Question

This is odd because I’m not inserting data, I’m pulling data with a query.

I’m trying to run

SELECT DISTINCT description FROM products;

Which outputs the error “The field is too small to accept the amount of data you attempted to add.”.

However, running the following doesn’t produce the error:

SELECT description FROM products;

So I’m confused as to what the issue would be.

I’m using OleDbDataReader and taking data out of an mdb database file.

Answer 1

This might be related to: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896950/us

This problem occurs because when you
set the UniqueValues query property to
Yes, a DISTINCT keyword is added to
the resulting SQL statement. The
DISTINCT keyword directs Access to
perform a comparison between records.
When Access performs a comparison
between two Memo fields, Access treats
the fields as Text fields that have a
255-character limit. Sometimes Memo
field data that is larger than 255
characters will generate the error
message that is mentioned in the
“Symptoms” section. Sometimes only 255
characters are returned from the Memo
field.

Workaround:

To work around this problem, modify
the original query by removing the
Memo field. Then, create a second
query that is based on both the table
and the original query. This new query
uses all the fields from the original
query, and this new query uses the
Memo field from the table. When you
run the second query, the first query
runs. Then, this data is used to run
the second query. This behavior
returns the Memo field data based on
the returned data of the first query.