I have a table containing a large number of rows. Each row has 2 columns which I need to use – the first is some HTML formatting and the second is the text. I need to concatenate all these rows into a single string value so that I can e-mail this massive string. Due to the large number of rows I can’t use a VARCHAR variable – I have to use text. The current solution is to use a cursor to read all the rows and then insert into a temporary table with a single column of type text and then simply append to the single row in that table.
The problem is that the string seems to get cutoff after about 33000 characters. I have absolutely no idea why this is happening.
EDIT: I have taken some of the advice from the answers given here and changed the solution to use VARCHAR(MAX). However I’m still getting cutoff, but in a very odd way. It doesn’t seem like the variable is getting an overflow, it’s simply not appending all the values.
DECLARE @Result VARCHAR(MAX)
SET @Result = ''
SELECT @Result = @Result + ltrim(isnull(format,'')) + ' ' + text + '<BR></TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="GEN" align="left" BGCOLOR="#E9ECFD">'
FROM SomeTable
The really odd bit is that if I take out the bit where I’m appending all that html at the end of the line, it all works fine. I’ve even inserted everything into a tmp table first and then did this concatenation select – still no luck. The tmp table contains the correct values (including the html), but the final variable doesn’t.