"Length" in table design view

I haven't been able to find an answer to this simple question from any of the
online documentation. In table design view, each one of my columns has a
datatype and length. Specifically, I have a column of dataype "ntext" with a
length of 16, but I don't know what that "16" means. 16 Bytes? How can I
determine the appropriate length to set it to, based on how many characters I
expect the field to hold?
Is there anywhere that explains in simple terms what each datatype is and
what the "length" means for each individual dataype? Thanks!
When text and image datatypes are stored in SQL Server, data page stores 16
byte pointer is stored that points to pages that stores the text\image data.

> How can I
> determine the appropriate length to set it to, based on how many
characters I
> expect the field to hold?
ntext datatype can store upto 1073741823 characters.
See more help on this in books online.
Vishal Parkar
vgparkar@.yahoo.co.in | vgparkar@.hotmail.com