SQL: ATER COLUMN to shorter CHAR(n) type

Posted by Rising Star on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Rising Star
Published on 2010-06-16T14:10:40Z Indexed on 2010/06/16 14:32 UTC
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alter-table

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alter-column

I'm working with MS SQL SERVER 2003. I want to change a column in one of my tables to have fewer characters in the entries. This is identical to this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2281336/altering-a-table-column-to-accept-more-characters except for the fact that I want fewer characters instead of more.

I have a column in one of my tables that holds nine-digit entries. A developer previously working on the table mistakenly set the column to hold ten-digit entries. I need to change the type from CHAR(10) to CHAR(9).

Following the instructions from the discussion linked above, I wrote the statement

ALTER TABLE [MY_TABLE] ALTER COLUMN [MY_COLUMN] CHAR(9);

This returns the error message "String or binary data would be truncated". I see that my nine-digit strings have a space appended to make them ten digits.

How do I tell SQL Server to discard the extra space and convert my column to a CHAR(9) type?

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