Our WSS server, which was a beta staging ground for at least a year before the deployment of Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, has pretty much had no problems. It's about 4GB in size and tons of users use it either for testing or even production use. About the only problem we've ever had was when a user clicked “Delete this document library” and actually thought it meant something else.
Recently, I created a list to track cell phones and blackberries. It tracks the phone number, assigned user, PIN, model type, status of the device, and the monthly phone and data plans on the devices (we're trying to go to corporate pool of minutes to save $$).
One of the data types was “Phone Plan Monthly” and it was just a single line of text. Then I had changed it to a Choice type and had choices like $49.99, $59.99, $79.99, etc. Then I realized later that really I wanted it to be of type currency because I would want to add up, average, and calculate things on this field.
When I went in to change this type to “Currency” I received the typical pop-up that said “Changing the type of this column may result in a loss of data. Are you sure you want to change this field from Choice to Currency?”
I said “ok” or “yes” and received the title error:
Now... you know what I'm thinking. “Oh crap, my server's out of disk space” or “What's wrong with SQL server?” or “now I have to go test out that restore procedure I've been working on”. Well, I checked disk space and SQL and everything seemed ok. Sure, maybe I was a little low, but I still had plenty of room.
So I checked around the site and everything else was working fine. I could even change the same field type from Choice to Single Line of text without a problem. So I started searching on the error.
Most of the results had to do with STS, not WSS. Plus, they seemed to imply that SQL was in read-only mode or something was preventing a write to the database. However, when I went around the site, I could add content in tons of places, so that wasn't it.
btw, the url that was passed to the server was
/server/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=UpdateField&List=[somelongstring]
So then I got to thinking -- maybe it's because the field has some data in it. I checked, and yes, this field had been used by some line items and contained entries like “$79.99”. Hmm, maybe the dollar sign is throwing it off or something?
I cleared out the entries in that field and tried again.
SUCCESS!
So evidently, when you change a data type from one type to another, and [I'm assuming here] SQL Server has a hard time converting the data, sometimes it throws an error instead of doing what it *should* do, which is throw out the data but give you a little log of what was thrown out.
So now I can continue on with tracking cell and blackberry costs without any nasty SQL server error messages.