MS-SQL definitely has a few performance implications... you also have limitations in terms of indexes. It also doesn't help that there are subtle differences b

MS-SQL definitely has a few performance implications... you also have limitations in terms of indexes. It also doesn't help that there are subtle differences between the different databases in terms of how this is handled. Aside, I really wish that MS had simply had an updated behavior for TEXT, where it behaved like VARCHAR(MAX) under the covers, given the underlying database was updated to version N. Which would be slightly easier to deal with in practice and more similar to say PostgreSQL where that is effectively already the behavior. Aside: None of this accounts for proper Unicode (UTF-8) normalization for indexing/size. Which leaves it to the application to deal with in practice.