Forum Discussion
ADO & VARCHAR
Aha - found other postings with the same issue, and someone posted a workaround (which seems to be working for us). I think it still a bug and a serious regression, but at least we can move forward (we happen to be at a point in the product cycle where we can put in a change like this)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52650021/msdatashape-error-broken-on-upgrade-to-windows-10-feature-update-1809
* workaround for this issue ... Replacing adVarChar(##) with adLongVarChar does the job for me ...This workaround is not applicable to queries like
SHAPE APPEND NEW adLongVarChar As INVNO, NEW adLongVarChar As iCP,
((SHAPE APPEND NEW aadLongVarChar As INVNO,NEW adLongVarCharAs iCP,NEW adLongVarChar As F1,NEW adLongVarChar As F2,NEW adLongVarChar As F3)
AS Trans RELATE INVNO TO INVNO,iCP TO iCP)* someone else suggested using adLongVarWChar
* there was also mention of a future deprecation of the Data Shaping Service for OLE DB
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ado/guide/appendixes/microsoft-data-shaping-service-for-ole-db-ado-service-provider
I am also having problems when I use Ole DB Provider: MSDataShape, when the SHAPE APPED command has a column declared as NEW adVarchar (50) ColumnName. When opening the dataset, you get an error saying that the column can not have zero length. This started after the 1809 update of windows 10. To resolve I removed this update, returning to 1803.
Thank you! It's good to know that we are not the only ones having this problem. Now how do we get Microsoft's attention? We were hoping that taking the effort to create the simple repro might speed up a solution, but so far I have not seen any response.
With Windows 10, the update to the semi-annual update happens automatically, so dropping back to 1803 is not really a solution for most folks. Fortunately, our application is run primarily on Windows Server (though a few prospects may run it on a desktop OS for a proof-of-concept trial), and for the moment we can tell our customers to avoid Windows Server 2019, but that is not a long-term solution.