Max. text length for InsertCursor field

MarcWouters

I am importing X,Y values from file into a shape, but I need to keep the labels of each point as well in my application.

By lack of a way to keep a list of texts, I create a long string, separated by tabs, to keep the labels and the shape in the same feature in the resulting table.

I use the following code

cursor = arcpy.da.InsertCursor("Pipes", ["Name", "SHAPE@", "PointLabels"])
cursor.insertRow([fileName, polyline, pointLabels])

For some datasets, I get this error

The row contains a bad value. [PointLabels]

I assume that this is caused by exceeding some size limit, but I cannot determine easily which size this could be. (number of points and length of text labels vary quite a lot).

Any idea if there is a limit, and if so, what is this limit ?

bixb0012

The file geodatabase text field is more like a varchar than char, so you don't really waste any disk space if the max length is set to 100 or 500,000.  It is the contents of the field that drive most of the space on disk.  That said, there may be performance issues tied to storing lots of short character strings in a field with a max length of 500,000; I don't know the FGDB innards enough to say for sure on performance.