What is the maximum characters for the NVARCHAR(MAX)?

I have declared a column of type `NVARCHAR(MAX)` in SQL Server 2008, what would be its exact maximum characters having the MAX as the length?

The max size for a column of type `NVARCHAR(MAX)` is 2 GByte of storage.

Since `NVARCHAR` uses 2 bytes per character, that's approx. 1 billion characters.

Leo Tolstoj's *War and Peace* is a 1'440 page book, containing about 600'000 words - so that might be 6 million characters - well rounded up. So you could stick about 166 copies of the entire *War and Peace* book into each `NVARCHAR(MAX)` column.

Is that enough space for your needs? :-)

>By default, nvarchar(MAX) values are stored exactly the same as nvarchar(4000) values would be, unless the actual length exceed 4000 characters; in that case, the in-row data is replaced by a pointer to one or more seperate pages where the data is stored.

If you anticipate data possibly exceeding 4000 character, nvarchar(MAX) is definitely the recommended choice.

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From [MSDN Documentation][1]

> **nvarchar** [ ( n | **max** ) ]
>
> Variable-length Unicode string data. _n_ defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 4,000. **max** indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB).
The storage size, in bytes, is two times the actual length of data entered + 2 bytes

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I think actually `nvarchar(MAX)` can store approximately 1070000000 chars.