What is the maximum number of characters allowed in a Note field in SharePoint?

Question

A Text field (SPFieldText) has a limit of 255 characters. What, if any, is the limit of the Note field (SPFieldMultiLineText)? The associated documentation on MSDN (linked above) doesn't list these limitations.

Answer 1

Well, according to the documentation, the notes field is the same as a field with the type set to note. That is equivalent to the nText field in SQL Server. Here is the limit for that field from the docs:

Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of 2^30 - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters.

Here are the links:

The page that you linked: spFieldMultilineText On that page it states

The SPFieldMultiLineText class corresponds to the Note data type that is specified through the Type attribute of the Field element.

Following the link to the Field element takes you to Field Element

Looking at the Type property, we see this:

Note Allows users to enter multiple lines of text. This field is not sortable or groupable. All text is defined to be straight ASCII characters without HTML markup. Anything that looks like HTML markup or a URL is simply quoted (for example, Server.HTMLEncode) to look like straight text. The control for editing this format is a simple TEXTAREA block. Use the NumLines attribute to specify the number of lines to display. Corresponds to the ntext SQL data type and represented by the SPFieldMultiLineText class."

Specifically of interest is "...Corresponds to the ntext SQL data type..."

A quick google for "ntext SQL data type" takes you to nText