How can I select the first 100 characters in SQL Server?

Question

I want to truncate a column to a max of 100 characters. How do you do this in SQL Server?

Answer 1

SELECT SUBSTR(COLUMN_NAME, 1, LENGTH) FROM TABLENAME where LENGTH(COLUMN_NAME) > LENGTH

Ex:

SELECT SUBSTR(DESCRIPTION,1,100) FROM STOREDETAILS where LENGTH(DESCRIPTION)>100

For those records, with length less than 100, the actual value would be shown.

Otherwise, some databases induce blank characters in the resultant records.