column of TEXT type max size [the answer may surprise you]

Once again I’ve been quite startled by how undocumented certain parts of backendless are. Certain basic parts actually. Like maximum size for text columns.
“Yuriy, you are so silly!”, probably thinking you now, “It have been answered quite a number of times!”
You right, twice. I do feel silly, and it’s been really answered number of times, by DevTeam!
http://support.backendless.com/t/what-is-the-size-of-the-string-datatype-is-it-500-characters
by Mark Piller “Columns of type TEXT have a limit of 2000 characters”, 1 year ago.
http://support.backendless.com/t/storing-large-amount-of-texthtml-in-the-database
very same sentence confirmed by Mark, 4 months ago
http://support.backendless.com/t/character-limit-for-stringstext
2000 from user’s question confirmed by Mark, 1 month ago
http://support.backendless.com/t/character-limit-on-stringtext
2000 from user’s question confirmed by Alexandr Navara, 1 month ago
But recently I, by mistake, tried to save big chunk of text in Data Browser. And received error message that maximum is 21000.
“Wow”, I thought, “They increased limit more than ten times! Lucky me!”
But support forum search revealed that this limit was mentioned long time ago:
http://support.backendless.com/t/text-max-size
Mark Piller himself answered two years ago “Maximum size for the properties of type TEXT is 21000 characters”
http://support.backendless.com/t/larger-data-column-table-than-21000-bytes
user asked about 21000 limit, Sergey Chupov confirmed - 10 months ago.
So, I guess 2000 was just a mistake that keep propagating through forum, due to lack of proper documentation. Or was there for real time period with 2000 as maximum? Or maybe on some platform it’s enforced limit, I tried big save only in REST so far.
Say a word, I would gladly update myself mentioned topics with correct limit, to help other devs keep their sanity.

A whole week has passed, I’m kindly asking for reply from dev team

Thanks for bumping this up, I meant to respond, but got distracted. I apologize.

There are two limits which cause the inconsistency in the responses and the implementation. The limit imposed by the export/import routine is set to 2000. In the current implementation (as of the date of this post) when you import a String value which has more than 2000 characters, Backendless will create a file and store a URL for the file as the value for the property.

However, when you save data through the API, the limit maintained by the system is 21000.

We will fix this inconsistency (setting it to 21000 everywhere) in version 4, which is what we’re currently working on.

Regards,
Mark

ok, it’s more clear now, thanks. When v4 is due, matter of days/weeks/months?

At this point looks like “months”

i want to know the maxmium size of external database i can create ?

@Naira, please create a separate support topic for your question as it is unrelated to the subject of this one.