Question

I have two tables (equipment & software) that I want to do an INNER JOIN on. They both have a field called EQCN. It is a text field. I get the following error:

The data types text and text are incompatible in the equal to operator.

There has to be a way around this.

Answer 1

Change the data types for these columns to varchar(max).

From Microsoft:

ntext, text, and image data types will be removed in a future version
of Microsoft SQL Server. Avoid using these data types in new
development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use
them. Use nvarchar(max), varchar(max), and varbinary(max) instead.