sql server 2008 - Is there any good way to debug "String or binary data would be truncated?"

Question

The year is 2010.

SQL Server licenses are not cheap.

And yet, this error still does not indicate the row or the column or the value that produced the problem. Hell, it can't even tell you whether it was "string" or "binary" data.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

A quick-and-dirty way of fixing these is to select the rows into a new physical table like so:

SELECT * INTO dbo.MyNewTable FROM <the rest of the offending query goes here>

...and then compare the schema of this table to the schema of the table into which the INSERT was previously going - and look for the larger column(s).