I wasn’t sure how long this will take; but due to a personal emergency, I won’t have much at this time. Was really hoping to start this year on a better note. 2020 apparently had a different plan.
Author Archives: Anthony Mattson
Unity Mega Bundle Deal
Well, this year isn’t starting out quite like I was hoping. Between dealing with a family emergency and COVID-19, I haven’t had much time to really focus on anything. Thankfully, work is not a current concern as I can work remote.
However, I’m still trying to keep in mind my goal of learning how to use Unity through all of this. Apparently, the tech gods decided to help throw me a bit of a bone to help keep me going. Spotted what to me looked like a fairly good deal that Unity shared via a LinkedIn post. They are offering a $1000 Mega Bundle for 90% off. Includes a one year subscription to their Unity Learn Premium service ($99 by itself) and a load of assets to use in Unity.
Figured what the hell and picked it up. Now to make sure I do something with it. Offer is good until the end of March in case anyone else is interested.
New Year Update
Okay, so I’ve been on another hiatus. Work has been killer while trying to maintain and manage an application in AWS and handling four different database migrations. Combine this with my team having been trimmed down to bare bones last year. It has been fun. I’ll leave it at that.
So after having to decom my own personal AWS infrastructure due to cost (aka, my free services were no longer free) and moving everything over to WordPress, I haven’t been up to much until recently.
First off, I finally have a project for my Raspberry Pi I’ve had on my desk for over a year. I just finished setting it up as a local WordPress server. Basically a WordPress playground I can mess around with to better understand how WordPress works so if I ever get back to setting up my own server, I’ll actually have an idea of what I’m doing. Ideally from scratch as well. Used a custom AMI from the market to setup in AWS last time. Wasn’t bad for getting started, but was a little to much for me to properly manage. Won’t likely expose this little guy to the world; but figured it this will be nice.
I’m also planning on finally starting to work on some of the example projects in Unity. Finally get my feet wet with some game development. I kept on getting stuck on wanting to try coding basic app first, but haven’t had much interest in anything. So instead of holding off on just playing around with Unity until I’m “ready”, I’m finally going to just give it a go.
Here’s to a new year and new projects (a month and a half after the year started).
SQL : “String or binary data would be truncated” Error
While supporting a number of MS SQL servers that I took over as DBA this year, I ran into a scheduled job that handles a nightly data feed started failing. After reverse engineering exactly how this job worked, I found a specific stored procedure failing with the “String or binary data would be truncated” error.
What does this mean? Basically, the process is trying to run an insert query and is trying to insert data into a column that is not big enough. For example, say I have a column defined as type nvarchar(3) and I’m trying to insert ‘testing’ into that column. This will generate this error as ‘testing’ is 7 characters and that column is limited to 3.
Solution! I have two options, ignore the error and let SQL truncate the data; or I can find the offending data increase the size of the destination column.
Ignoring the error by adding “SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF” to the query will get me around the error; but be warned it will truncate the data and is not recommended.
This leaves increasing the size of the destination column. However, when my source data has over 100k rows of data and my destination table has over 35 columns, that is easier said then done. I could just increase the size of every column in my destination table; but that is overkill in my case. I know there are likely more elaborate ways of going about finding the offending data; but due to time, I needed to find the offending data quick. While this query is very simple, it worked perfectly to help me find the offending data: