Tuesday, August 19, 2008

String or binary data would be truncated

Hi folks.
I named this article with this pretty famous error message. I'm sure that everybody has seen this error at least once.This week I visited our client who asked me very intresting question. They have a table with many columns that most of them defined as VARCHAR(n) datatype. One of the query has been failing with below error.

"Msg 8152, Level 16, State 14, Line 1
String or binary data would be truncated.
The statement has been terminated."

Well ,we knew for sure that the user supplied a string which does not match with column datatype but real question is WHICH of so many columns? As I said, they have more than 50 columns and it was pretty difficult to identify on which column is failed.
My point is that it would be nice to have more information from this error message about which column is failing and I hope that MS will do something for the matter.