<P> A varchar or Variable Character Field is a set of character data of indeterminate length . The term varchar refers to a data type of a field (or column) in a database management system which can hold letters and numbers . Varchar fields can be of any size up to a limit, which varies by databases: an Oracle 11g database has a limit of 4000 bytes, a MySQL 5.7 database has a limit of 65,535 bytes (for the entire row) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has a limit of 8000 characters (unless varchar (max) is used, which has a maximum storage capacity of 2 gigabytes). </P>

Maximum size of varchar max in sql server