You *shouldn't* lose any data -backups are always a nice thing have.

Downside.
- Limited ability for comparisons, i.e., {=, <>, <, >, LIKE, etc.]
- Inability to search using patindex(), charindex(),
- More coding and handling to EDIT/UPDATE field values
- Can't use 'regular' indexing
(I'm sure that there are more issues...)

If it is necessary, then you really have little choice. If you can avoid it,
do so.

Upgrading to SQL 2005 provides a new datatype varchar(max) which allow
getting past the 8000 byte limit, and still maintains works like a varchar()
for comparisons, searching, indexes, etc.

--
Arnie Rowland, Ph.D.
Westwood Consulting, Inc

Most good judgment comes from experience.
Most experience comes from bad judgment.
- Anonymous


[quoted text, click to view]

Using SQL 2000 for an ASP Intranet app. When this started 4 years ago, I
created two fields of type varchar, size 5000 (they were description fields,
so it was possible to have this many characters). I did this because of my
inexperience. Now I know that for something this size, a text field would be
better. My question: if I just up and change the datatype, will it corrupt
or lose existing data? Any other potential problems I am not seeing?