Excel Source Output. The column status returned was: “Text was truncated or one or more characters had no match in the target code page.”

I came across this error when I was attempting to import data from an Excel spreadsheet into a SQL database using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2005.  The error occurs because by default the Excel driver only reads the first eight rows of the spreadsheet when it determines the column data type and data length. [...]

The case of the failed SQL backup

I enabled a maintenance plan on a SQL server which creates a full backup of all databases.  When checking the job history I noticed that the job had failed.  Upon further investigation I could see that although the job had failed, all the databases had been backed up.  Opening the job log revealled the following [...]