What is the maximum characters for the NVARCHAR(MAX)? [duplicate]

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.

Source: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/databasedesign/thread/d5e0c6e5-8e44-4ad5-9591-20dc0ac7a870/