20081122

Built In Bugs :: VarChar

Alexander Kuznetsov pointed this one out on his blog. He goes on to a longer explanation and how to test for the issue in general (see link). SS

In Transact SQL you can assign a 10-character value to a VARCHAR(5) variable, as follows:

DECLARE @c VARCHAR(5); SET @c='1234567890'; PRINT @c

12345

The value will be silently truncated without raising an error. Because of this behavior it may be very easy to make mistakes.

20081121

Please use comments ...

Many management types continually rant about leaving comments in the code so that the next person will be able to figure out what is going on. Sometimes it just proves something else ...

'* Comments: IMPORTANT: The global constants are being temporarily prefaced with "" until
'* all the reports can be integrated with calls to the delegate methods. Afterwards,
'* a global search/replace of "" with "" should rename the constants to coding
'* standards compliancy.

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