Characters are changing after an alter table alter column executed?

Question

Characters are changing after an alter table alter column executed?

Thinky Night

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Points: 1663
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February 11, 2019 at 10:52 pm

#370544

Hi dears,
Some problems occured during an ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN statement.
My SQL Server Instance Collation : SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
My Database Collation: Turkish_CI_AS
My Column Data Type: nvarchar(200)
And change it to varchar(200)
When I executed:
ALTER TABLE myTable ALTER COLUMN myColumn varchar(200);

My Turkish Characters went bad. After executed the DDL Statement, i checked the collation of the COLUMN: and it was TURKISH_CI_AS, also.
How do i achieve this?
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Luis Cazares SSC Guru Points: 183706 More actions · Answer 1

Thinky Night - Monday, February 11, 2019 10:52 PM
Hi dears,
Some problems occured during an ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN statement.
My SQL Server Instance Collation : SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
My Database Collation: Turkish_CI_AS
My Column Data Type: nvarchar(200)
And change it to varchar(200)
When I executed:
ALTER TABLE myTable ALTER COLUMN myColumn varchar(200);

My Turkish Characters went bad. After executed the DDL Statement, i checked the collation of the COLUMN: and it was TURKISH_CI_AS, also.
How do i achieve this?
Waiting your responses...

You altered the column and went from unicode to ascii. You limited the available characters for the column and in that process you lost the Turkish characters. If you need Unicode characters, you need to keep Unicode columns.
There's no way to recover your data, unless you take it from a backup.

Luis C.
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Are you seriously taking the advice and code from someone from the internet without testing it? Do you at least understand it? Or can it easily kill your server?

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323518 More actions · Answer 2

restore the table from a backup. you have permanently converted the previous data to bad data/question marks instead of retaining the original values.
Turkish characters sets use UNICODE, which plain old varchar does not support. varchar supports just plain old ascii characters.

Lowell

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