Microsoft

Ran into this error when my back-end database crashed on my application. I would be able to view the first record, but as soon as I went to the next record using either the navigation bar or the combo-box I use to find records I would get this error: "No current record"

Looked at the results of numerous google searches and found Allen Browne's solution quite handy. However none of his tips included my situation: failure while viewing data.

Turns out I simply had to relink my tables!

Sometimes simple solutions always evade us. I spent quite a few hours before I got to this. Hope it works for you!

Ran into "invalid character value for cast specification" error after I changed the data type for one of the field in my SQL Server 2008 database.

Environment
SQL Server 2005 backend
Access 2007 front-end

I changed a datetime field to char in SQL Server because (1) I didn't plan on any data manipulation with this field and (2) the data was coming in as text (255) from a CSV file. Basically I did not want to mess with the CAST/CONVERT functions.

Immediately after making this change, the form using that data wouldn't load. This became a headache when it didn't load even after removing the field from the form.

Google searches revealed everything from blanks in the source column, conversion issues to invalid dates, service packs and hotfixes.

There are many ways to copy and distribute a SQL server database to multiple users. In an academic setting, you have to constrain the students' access to just their database. That is, they usually don't have enough privileges to create databases. So, they cannot attach databases. In such cases, you have to jump through some hoops to make the distribution of the sample database possible. Some of these are listed here

1. Import the database into an empty Microsoft Access database through ODBC and share the Access DB with the class. The students can import it back into their SQL server database
2. Use the Publishing Wizard. I found this tool VERY handy as it creates the SQL you need to create all the tables and data. This blog post at Systems Engineering and RDBMS details how you can get this tool (in case you don't already have it) and call it from the command line to script just the data, just the schema or both