Words, sentences and paragraphs (precisely what you are reading). A page of text takes approximately from 2,000 to 4,000 bytes of storage. Text is typically free form words in contrast to "data," which are structured units such as quantity, total, city and state. Data are stored in fixed, columnar locations within database records.
XML Text Can Be Data
XML is a widely used format for holding data and is entirely text based. XML records contain text with tags that mark the beginning and end of the units of data such as quantity, total, etc. See
XML and
text field.