Troubleshooting issues in automation studio
Another series of troubleshooting automations in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. I will regurarly add any new additions that I have already resolved and spend great deal of time and life energy. So hope it will help resolve someones issues.
I will try to add, throughout my daily life as an SFMC consultant, all the errors that I have experienced and resolved. Many resolutions can be found on the Salesforce help page. For those not listed there, I’ll make a point to list them out, sharing my hands-on experiences and solutions to help others facing similar challenges.
The value is too long to store into a data type.
This error often lacks specific information about which field to examine, and even Salesforce support may not provide a direct answer initially. However, they usually identify the issue upon further investigation. The error could arise from two main scenarios: when attempting to save records to the database or due to a problem in your SQL query or code.
Attempting to save records to the database
It seems like the field values you have selected are out of range for their corresponding fields in the database. To resolve this, try adding restrictions to fields or increasing field lengths or their types that you think may cause this issue. In my case, the issue was with the language field, which was set to accept only two characters, but often we received language values that were more than two characters in length.
Another issue I recently encountered was when I tried to save a numeric string into a number field in a data extension. This numeric string was outside the integer boundaries, causing an syntax error. In such cases, it’s important to ensure that the data types and their limits in the data extension match the actual data being inputted.
#for any field string that is of lenght 255 to make sure we will save the same lenght LEFT(255)
Problem in your SQL query or code.
This occurred directly in my SQL query, where I was creating a compound field out of an integer and a numeric string, and somehow it was interpreted as a number that was way beyond the length of the integer field.
It’s likely due to the way SQL handles data types in operations. When you try to create a compound field using an integer and a numeric string, SQL might automatically attempt to convert all operands to a common data type. If this common type is a numeric type and the resulting value exceeds the maximum size that can be stored in that type, it results in a data overflow error or a syntax error. By explicitly converting the number to a string, you can control the data type and avoid these errors.
SELECT CAST(your_integer_column AS VARCHAR) AS converted_string FROM your_table;
