Why does Access suck so bad?

May 25, 2005 2:14 PM

Access 2003, ActiveState Perl, Win32::ODBC: my MEMO fields are being truncated to 255 characters when I pull them via SQL queries from a Perl script.

I've messed with the SetMaxBufSize method provided by Win32::ODBC, even though the default is supposed to be upwards of 10 KB, with no luck. I've spent hours reading through useless docs on MSDN and am at my wit's end. These aren't especially long fields, usually under 1,000 characters, nor is there anything other than plain ASCII in them. It seems that something, somewhere, is treating the field as a TEXT field, not a NTEXT or LONGVAR or whatever it's supposed to be.

posted by IshmaelGraves to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Doing a quick Google search yielded some results that suggest Access will truncate Memo fields when retrieved with complex SQL statements such as unions. Perhaps that is your problem?
posted by geeky at 2:42 PM on May 25, 2005

It was the SELECT DISTINCT that did it — switching to a plain SELECT and deduping elsewhere did it. Thanks.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 2:48 PM on May 25, 2005

wow. that's quite amazingly bad.
posted by andrew cooke at 2:56 PM on May 25, 2005

This is why I'm making a career out of rewriting Access databases into more robust solutions. :-P
posted by SpecialK at 3:00 PM on May 25, 2005

Funny - my job involves converting those databases to Access. I suppose we cancel each other out.
posted by ed\26h at 3:58 PM on May 25, 2005

I frequently connect to mysql databases from access to build reports. Access is really cool in some ways and really bad in others.
posted by ph00dz at 8:43 PM on May 25, 2005