When I mentioned to the developer that it’s probably not the best idea, he turned around and asked me, ‘why not?’
It was a genuine question. Why shouldn’t we just spam VARCHAR(MAX) over all of our columns? On the upside, it would get rid of all those annoying issues that crop up when we try to insert a value that overflows the datatype.
Click through for a video as well as a blog post laying out some of the problem with using VARCHAR(MAX) all willy-nilly.