Convert ntext to varbinary(max)

Question

Is it possible to convert column values from ntext to varbinary(max) in SQL server 2000 R2 ?

Doing a workaround I found, initially I need to convert from ntext to nvarchar() then from nvarchar() to varbinary(max) .

Answer 1

No this is not a supported direct conversion.

As shown in the Data Type Conversion topic ( image ) you can only cast from ntext to one of the other string datatypes or to XML.

But you don't need to do this anyway.

The argument

Because i want the data to be stored in binary format.

doesn't make sense as it won't affect the physical storage anyway. See below that the actual bytes stored are the same.

CREATE TABLE T
(
A NVARCHAR(MAX),
B VARBINARY(MAX)
)

INSERT INTO T 
SELECT N'foobar',
       CAST(N'foobar' AS VARBINARY(MAX))

It just affects how the bytes are interpreted logically. Storing as varbinary datatype would make the data more difficult to work with (need to cast back to nvarchar to use as a string) and your application more fragile. Conversions between any data type and the binary data types are not guaranteed to be the same between versions of SQL Server.