I recently crashed when I tried:


select intcolumn, charcolumn from tablea
union all
select charcolumn, intcolumn from tableb
The message was that the data types couldn't be converted.

Checking SQL help, I was surprised to learn that both the number of columns and the order of the columns have to match- column names don't seem to matter at all.


So.. this UNION of all char columns doesn't crash :


select sealnumber, customer from tablea
union all
select customer,sealnumber from tableb

but the result is whacky.
The sealnumber column contains sealnumbers from table A and customers from table B and
the customer column contains customers from table A and sealnumbers from table B