If you’re using the WAITFOR statement in SQL Server, and you get the following error, it’s probably because you’re providing a query as its argument.

Msg 101, Level 15, State 1, Line 1
Query not allowed in Waitfor.

The WAITFOR statement doesn’t accept queries for its “wait for” period. It only accepts a specific time or an interval.

Actually, it does accept RECEIVE statements, but this is only applicable to Service Broker messages, so if you’re not using Service Broker messages, the above error is quite self-explanatory.

Continue reading →

If you get an error telling you that the “The multi-part identifier could not be bound.”, it usually means that you’re prefixing one or more columns with either a table that isn’t included in your query, or an alias that you haven’t actually assigned to a table.

Fortunately, the error message shows you which multi-part identifier is causing the problem.

Continue reading →

This is a commonly encountered error in SQL Server when inserting data into a table. The full error goes like this:

Msg 109, Level 15, State 1, Line 1
There are more columns in the INSERT statement than values specified in the VALUES clause. The number of values in the VALUES clause must match the number of columns specified in the INSERT statement.

This happens when you specify more columns in the INSERT statement than the number of values that you’re trying to insert with the VALUES clause.

This will occur if you accidentally omit one or more values from the VALUES clause.

You’d get a similar (but technically different) error if you tried to do the opposite – specify fewer columns in the INSERT statement than you try to insert.

Continue reading →