Implications of nvarchar (50) vs nvarchar (max)

Question

What are the general storage and performance differences between the below two tables if their only difference is nvarchar(50) vs. nvarchar(max) an

Answer 1

First and foremost, you won't be able to create indexes on the (max) length columns. So if you are going to store searchable data, ie., if these columns are going to be part of the WHERE predicate, you may not be able to improve the query performance. You may need to consider FullText Search and indexes on these columns in such a case.