DataGinger.com

Today morning when I was working on a huge database containing lots of LOB data, I was required to know what tables have LOB data, and the list of LOB columns by table name along with the data type.

I found that starting SQL Server 2005, we can easily retrieve this information from the Information Schema Views, by specifying “COLUMN_NAME” in view_name. There may be even a better way to do this, but here is what I came-up with.

USE [AdventureWorks2012]
GO
SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
WHERE DATA_TYPE IN ('FILESTREAM','XML','VARBINARY','TEXT','NTEXT','IMAGE') 
OR(DATA_TYPE IN ('VARCHAR', 'NVARCHAR') AND CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH = -1)
ORDER BY TABLE_NAME

HERE is an explanation by Pinal Dave, why I have to include CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH = -1 in the above query

Sample Output:

Below column types are considered LOB (Large Objects):
VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), FILESTREAM, XML, VARBINARY,
TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE

Note: Data types TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE were deprecated in SQL Server 2012 and are going to be removed in future versions, so Microsoft doesn’t recommend using them in new applications. For more information, please refer HERE