Question

In a table, I have a column called MEMO_TEXT that is a text data type. When I try creating a view and use a GROUP BY, I get the following error:

SQL Server Database Error: The text, ntext, and image data types cannot be compared or sorted, except when using IS NULL or LIKE operator.

I get this error when I try to do a DISTINCT on the query as well. Any ideas on how to get around this?

If you need any more information, please let me know.

Answer 1

One hack around it is to cast it as an nvarchar(max).

This is a documented way to increase the string length beyond 4,000:

nvarchar [ ( n | max ) ]

Variable-length Unicode string data. n defines the string length and can be a value from 1 through 4,000. max indicates that the maximum storage size is 2^31-1 bytes (2 GB). The storage size, in bytes, is two times the actual length of data entered + 2 bytes. The ISO synonyms for nvarchar are national char varying and national character varying.

A similar trick applies to varchar().