# Thursday, August 19, 2010

I am working on an MS Access database that needs to be integrated in a CRM system. Since the backend of the CRM is SQL Server (why else would I be involved), I migrated the Access database to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access v4.2 (SSMA for Access). Next I turned my attention to translating attributes between the systems and unfortunately, a free text notes field in the Access database is used for a lot of things that need to be translated to attributes. Some things I know how to translate, but some things have to be determined by the administrators for the CRM System and Access application. So I built a query in SQL on the tables formerly stored in the Access database and used Excel (with MS Query) to create a report for the administrators, so they can sort out how customer statuses should be translated.

Extremely simplified, the query looked like this;

SELECT tlbCustomer.CUST_CODE
  , tlbCustomer.
PAY_REF
  , COALESCE(UPPER(REPLACE(tblNotes.NOTE_TXT,'.','')),'') AS
NOTE_TXT
FROM tlbCustomer LEFT OUTER JOIN
tblNotes
      ON tlbCustomer.CUST_ID = tblNotes.
CUST_ID
GROUP BY tlbCustomer.
CUST_CODE
  , tlbCustomer.
PAY_REF
  , UPPER(REPLACE(tblNotes.NOTE_TXT,'.',''
))
ORDER BY COUNT(*)
DESC

The query worked great on SQL, but did not return the text (NOTE_TXT) to Excel.

To cut the long story short, the original tblNotes.NOTE_TXT field in the Access database was of type MEMO. SSMA 2008 for Access converted this to nvarchar(max) and somehow MS Query (in Office 2007) does not return, nor throw an error on, large data types (varchar(max), nvarchar(max)). A quick test showed that MAX was not really needed;

SELECT MAX(LEN(tblNotes.NOTE_TXT)) FROM tblNotes

So modify the query to return NOTE_TXT as nvarchar(256) does the trick;

SELECT tlbCustomer.CUST_CODE
  , tlbCustomer.
PAY_REF
  , CAST
(
      COALESCE(UPPER(REPLACE(tblNotes.NOTE_TXT,'.','')),'')

    AS nvarchar(256)) AS
NOTE_TXT
FROM tlbCustomer LEFT OUTER JOIN
tblNotes
      ON tlbCustomer.CUST_ID = tblNotes.
CUST_ID
GROUP BY tlbCustomer.
CUST_CODE
  , tlbCustomer.
PAY_REF
  , UPPER(REPLACE(tblNotes.NOTE_TXT,'.',''
))
ORDER BY COUNT(*)
DESC
Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:26:16 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)