What does the SQL Server Error "String Data, Right Truncation" mean and how do I fix it?

Question

We are doing some performance tests on our website and we are getting the following error a lot:

*** 'C:\inetpub\foo.plex' log message at: 2008/10/07 13:19:58
DBD::ODBC::st execute failed: [Microsoft][SQL Native Client]String data, right truncation (SQL-22001) at C:\inetpub\foo.plex line 25.

Line 25 is the following:

SELECT DISTINCT top 20 ZIP_CODE, CITY, STATE FROM Zipcodes WHERE (ZIP_CODE like ?) OR (CITY like ?) ORDER BY ZIP_CODE

And lastly, this is perl code.

Any ideas?

EDIT: the issue here was that I was searching in the zip file with the string "74523%" which is too long. I ended up just not adding the % if they give five digits.

Answer 1

Either the parameter supplied for ZIP_CODE is larger (in length) than ZIP_CODEs column width or the parameter supplied for CITY is larger (in length) than CITYs column width.

It would be interesting to know the values supplied for the two ? placeholders.