When running unit tests, I often using ActiveRecordStarter.CreateSchema() in my test startups to give me a clean database to work from. Whether or not this should be done by a SQL script or a restore from a backup is for another time. On one such occasion, I started getting a 'binary or string data would be truncated' error being thrown and on closer inspection, I noticed it was because of a certain column that was originally nvarchar (max) by design, but had been recreated by ActiveRecord as nvarchar (255). A quick Google found many folks having this problem and the solutions varied...