In ASE, you can create unichar and univarchar variables up to a length of 8192 bytes. In MS SQL Server, for nchar and nvarchar, 4,000 characters (= 8,000 bytes) is the maximum. If you need anything larger than that, you have to use nchar(max) or nvarchar(max). Variables and columns of the type nchar(max) or nvarchar(max) can contain up to 4 GB of information, which equals 2,147,483,648 characters of 2 bytes length.