# String data type in Managed ClickHouse®

Managed ClickHouse® uses ClickHouse® databases, which can store diverse types of data, such as strings, decimals, booleans, or arrays.

## About strings in ClickHouse

ClickHouse allows strings of any length. Strings can contain an
arbitrary amount of bytes, which are stored and output as-is. The string
type replaces the types VARCHAR, BLOB, CLOB, and others from other
database management systems (DBMS). When creating tables, numeric
parameters for string fields can be set (for example, TEXT(140)) but are
ignored.

ClickHouse supports the following aliases for strings: LONGTEXT,
MEDIUMTEXT, TINYTEXT, TEXT, LONGBLOB, MEDIUMBLOB, TINYBLOB, BLOB,
VARCHAR, CHAR.

## String-handling functions

-   [Functions for working with
    strings](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/string-functions)

-   [Functions for searching in
    strings](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/string-search-functions)

> [!NOTE]
> By default, the search is case-sensitive in these functions, but
> case-insensitive search variants are also available.

-   [Functions for searching and replacing in
    strings](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/string-replace-functions)

-   [Functions for splitting and merging strings and
    arrays](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/splitting-merging-functions)

## String conversions

Any plain string type can be cast to a different type using functions in
[Type Conversion
Functions](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/type-conversion-functions).

## Strings and JSON

ClickHouse supports a wide range of functions for working with JSON.
With specific functions, you can use strings for extracting JSON.

Learn more on [JSON functions in
ClickHouse](https://clickhouse.com/docs/reference/functions/regular-functions/json-functions).

> [!NOTE]
> **Examples**
> -   `visitParamExtractString(params, name)`: Parse the string in double
>     quotes.
> -   `JSONExtractString(json[, indices_or_keys]…)`: Parse a JSON and
>     extract a string.
> -   `toJSONString`: Convert a value of any data type to its JSON
>     representation.