View_Definition in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS is limited to 4000 characters

Question

I'm backing up all of my views by running this query, and storing the results in a table:

select 
   TABLE_CATALOG as DBName
 , TABLE_NAME as ViewName
 , VIEW_DEFINITION as ViewDef
 , datalength(VIEW_DEFINITION) as [Length]
 , GETDATE() as ImportDate 
from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS
order by DBName, ViewName

But the datatype for the VIEW_DEFINITION column is set to nvarchar(4000) and some of my views are much longer than that - so they're truncating.

Columns in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS

Can I change the datatype of the VIEW_DEFINITION column to varchar(max) somehow?

Answer 1

Since INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS is a view you can run EXEC sp_helptext 'information_schema.views' to find out the definition. This returns

CREATE VIEW INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS
AS
    SELECT DB_NAME() AS TABLE_CATALOG ,
           SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS TABLE_SCHEMA ,
           name AS TABLE_NAME ,
           CONVERT(NVARCHAR(4000), OBJECT_DEFINITION(object_id)) AS VIEW_DEFINITION ,
           CONVERT(VARCHAR(7) ,
                   CASE with_check_option
                        WHEN 1 THEN 'CASCADE'
                        ELSE 'NONE'
                   END) AS CHECK_OPTION ,
           'NO' AS IS_UPDATABLE
    FROM   sys.views;

From there just edit to get what you need which is

SELECT  
 DB_NAME() AS DBName,  
 name  AS ViewName,  
 OBJECT_DEFINITION(object_id)  AS ViewDef,  
 LEN(OBJECT_DEFINITION(object_id)) AS [Length],
 GETDATE() AS ImportDate
FROM  
 sys.views