Deprecated SQL Server Data Types
Quick warning, in case you haven’t heard yet. The text, ntext, and image data types are deprecated in SQL Server 2005. That means that they are still there for backward compatibility but that they will disappear in some future version of SQL Server, and are probably not going to get much attention in service packs.
Microsoft commonly leaves deprecated features in two versions of a product, but I get the impression that these data types won’t last that long.
In SQL Server 2005, use varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max). These allow 2^^30 or 2^^31 bytes of data (the smaller is for Unicode text).