Question

I have a field in a table that I want to store a potentially long error string. To this end I selected varchar(MAX) as the data type. I have created a stored procedure that is used to enter that data in the table and for the field “ErrorDescription” I used the following parameter definition.

@ErrorDescription as varchar(MAX)

The problem is within the ADO Procedure (within Access 2003) that calls the stored procedure to log the error. I take the error description as a string value and attempt to assign it to the parameter …

cmd.Parameters("@ErrorDescription").Value = errorDescription

but it fails with the following error.

“Parameter object is improperly defined”

If I change the stored procedure definition to …

 @ErrorDescription as varchar(255)

Then all works well. How can I define the stored procedure parameter to accept a potentially very long string? Is varchar(MAX) the wrong datatype to use? Thank you.

EDIT I should have mentioned the version of SQL Server I was using. I am using SQL Server 2008.

Answer 1

varchar(MAX) was introduced with SQL Server version 2005. I assume that you are using the 2000 version. If so, then you can wither use varchar(8000) or Text