A customer asked me how long could the Last Name field on a contact be?
an interesting question, even if it wasn’t one I was expecting.
I initially was slightly confused and wondered if the maximum length was words or characters when you are creating a new field. It’s characters if you are wondering.
The limit is 4000 characters, I can’t imagine anyone with a name that long and you would have to pity someone signing their name if it was over 1000 characters let alone 4000.
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The answer is 4000 because SQL won’t allow more than 8,000 bytes* in a single row, so clearly a column is also limited by this and CRM always uses unicode (hence the n in nvarchar) so that’s 2 bytes per character. Hope this helps explain things.
*actually 8060 but there’s some overhead of things like row headers and so on.
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thanks Adam, I hadn’t thought about the underlying SQL database. It’s always good to have understand the logic behind things
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How do you determine the max length for other fields? Wondering in this instance, about the Other Activities field. Thanks!
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