Slick84 (8/10/2009)

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So...why exactly is this happening? I thought the whole 'This is a test string' without the quotes would show up in my result-set.

Aaron N. Cutshall (8/10/2009)

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I've been burnt by this "feature" too often to not recognize it! It took me hours to track down an issue cause by a string truncation that was being passed as a parameter to an SP. Increasing the parameter size was all it took to fix it.

Time spent tracking down the problem: 6.5 hours
Time spent actually fixing the problem: 5 seconds

create proc dbo.testProc 
@testVar varchar(4) 
as 
select @testVar 
GO 
exec testProc 123456
GO

Explanation: Stored procedure calls will silently truncate strings.

declare @testVar varchar(4)
set @testVar = 'This is a test string'
select @testVar

Aaron N. Cutshall (8/10/2009)

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Time spent tracking down the problem: 6.5 hours
Time spent actually fixing the problem: 5 seconds

The data type of a parameter determines the type and range of values that are accepted for the parameter. For example, if you define a parameter with a tinyint data type, only numeric values ranging from 0 to 255 are accepted. An error is returned if a stored procedure is executed with a value incompatible with the data type.