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I have a table which has a VARCHAR(MAX) column, and I need to change it to VARBINARY(MAX).
I tried using the command
ALTER TABLE TableName ALTER COLUMN ColumnName VARBINARY(MAX)
but I got the error
Msg 257, Level 16, State 3, Line 1
Implicit conversion from data type varchar(max) to varbinary(max) is not allowed.
Use the CONVERT function to run this query.
The table has no data, so I can't understand why it's complaining about data conversion.
357
Implicit conversion from data type varchar to varbinary is not allowed. Use the CONVERT function to run this query.
The VARBINARY type is similar to the VARCHAR type, but stores binary byte strings rather than non-binary character strings.
VARCHAR(MAX) is different from VARCHAR because it supports character strings up to 2 GB (2,147,483,647 bytes) in length. You should consider using VARCHAR(MAX) only when each string stored in this data type varies considerably in length, and a value might exceed 8000 bytes in size.
Values in VARCHAR columns are variable-length strings. The length can be specified as a value from 0 to 65,535. The effective maximum length of a VARCHAR is subject to the maximum row size (65,535 bytes, which is shared among all columns) and the character set used. See Section 8.4.
You cannot perform this conversion using an ALTER TABLE statement since converting from varchar(max) to varbinary(max) requires an explicit conversion. So you should follow these steps to alter your table:
VARBINARY(MAX)
VARCHAR(MAX) column, use update statement to add the data to the VARBINARY columnVARCHAR(MAX) columnvarbinary column to varchar name (per comment from @Ben Thul)
154
Convert Varchar to Int and then change Int to Binary.
30
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