LOB Data Pages
If you want to store large amounts of text or binary data, you can use the varchar(max)
, nvarchar(max)
, and varbinary(max)
data types. (For information about how to use these data types, see Chapter 21, “Creating and Managing Tables,” and Chapter 38, “Database Design and Performance.”) Each column for a row of these data types can store up to 2GB (minus 2 bytes) of data. By default, the LOB values are not stored as part of the data row, but as a collection of pages on their own. For each LOB column, the data page contains a 16-byte pointer, which points to the location of the initial page of the LOB data. A row with several LOB columns has one pointer for each column.
Note
The other LOB data types, text
, ntext
, and image
, have ...
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