I am using a SQL 2000 database.
I am working with a database in which I cannot change the types on the tables, or the stored procedures. One of the stored procedures
Declare the variable of type varchar(8000)
varchar(8000)
declare @v varchar(8000) SET @v = (SELECT CAST(textcol as varchar(8000)) FROM yourtable WHERE ....)
Obviously it might still be truncated but not at 1 character.