At 12:24 PM 3/20/2002 -0400, Daniel Rail wrote:

>I do change a field from varchar(18) to varchar(6) in that table. And, in
>one record, the field was bigger than 6 characters.
>
>Here's the process that is used in my code (the syntax might not be
>accurate, but gives you an idea):
>1. ALTER TABLE tbl ADD TEMP VARCHAR(6) CHARACTER SET UNICODE_FSS
>2. UPDATE tbl SET TEMP=field_being_updated
>3. ALTER TABLE tbl DROP field_being_updated
>4. ALTER TABLE tbl ALTER TEMP TO field_being_updated
>
>The field being updated was created with UNICODE_FSS as well.
>
>Hope gives more indication on what could've happened. As you can see I
>don't directly modify the system tables.

Hmmm... strange. I would expect that you'd get the error on the
update statement. My guess at the culprit is step 4 above, changing
the name of the column. A safer, though longer, way to do that
would be to replace step 4 with

4. alter table tbl add field_being_updated
5. update tbl set field_being_updated = temp
6. alter table tbl drop field temp



Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
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