Question

The following query does not work, and produces an error:

A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server

SELECT 
    * 
FROM 
    table1 a, 
    table2 b, 
    table3 c 
WHERE 
    a.location = b.location AND 
    b.location = c.location AND 
    a.id = c.id AND 
    a.entry = ''34690''

Although this query works:

SELECT 
    a.location, 
    a.id, 
    a.entry, 
    c.desc, 
    b.name 
FROM 
    table1 a, 
    table2 b, 
    table3 c 
WHERE 
    a.location = b.location AND 
    b.location = c.location AND 
    a.id = c.id AND 
    a.entry = ''34690''

I need to select pretty much everything from all tables (about 100 items), but do I really need to specify each column that I need in the resultset?

Answer 1

Even though it’s generally a good practice to avoid using the * qualifier when writing client SELECT queries, there could be a few reason why it might not be working:

• the SQL server product you are using, or the driver you are using does not support retrieving that many (100) columns in a single query.
• the total size of all the columns you are trying to get back is larger than the maximum supported (most likely by the driver) – this could occur if you some of the columns are of large data types and contain a lot of data such as many VARCHAR(MAX) or TEXT columns
• or there may be actually be a poor network connection between your server and the client – you should verify this one by executing the query locally on the server.

EDIT

OK, so the problem seems to be that one of the columns contains text amounting to about 1000 characters. Any way around that one??

Have you tried running a query to return just the one column that causes the problem? If you have and that worked by itself but causes the full query to fail you could try to run two queries. One to get the rest of the columns, and one to get the remaining one column. Then in your client, re-assemble the information.. If you do go this route, you will have to make sure you include whatever unique identifier you are using to identify each record in both queries so that you can map back the long-text-column to the rest of the information for each record.