How can I create a SQL varbinary of size greater than 8000 bytes?

Question

I want to create a varbinary(16384) but cant because the size must be a max of 8000 or MAX. I don't want to use MAX because I want an error thrown if the field size inserted is greater than 16384. Is there anyway to do this?

Answer 1

Use MAX. Constrain the field and handle the error in the data layer / application.

It sounds like you are trying to push data to a table, and are depending upon the SQL Server to throw back an error. IMO, this is too far 'down stream' to handle this type of thing.

Answer 2

Interesting, according to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143432.aspx the maximum size of varbinary is actually 2^31 - 1 for both 32-bit and 64-bit sql server