Database Snapshot vs Procedure Cache

I recently stumbled upon a KB article (KB917828) that points out some situations in which your procedure cache is cleared.

Since one of our architectures for reporting involved database snapshots I was suprised to read that your whole procedure cache is cleared when you drop a database snapshot. This may not be as dramatic as it sounds but you should closely watch the impact on your environment when the cache is cleared.

Other situations are:

• A database has the AUTO_CLOSE database option set to ON. When no user connection references or uses the database, the background task tries to close and shut down the database automatically.
• A database has the AUTO_CLOSE database option set to ON. Maintenance operations are performed, such as the DBCC CHECKDB operation or a backup operation. When the operations finish, the background task tries to close and shut down the database automatically.
• You run several queries against a database that has default options. Then, the database is dropped.
• You change the database state to OFFLINE or ONLINE.
• You successfully rebuild the transaction log for a database.
• You restore a database backup.

Insufficient result space to convert uniqueidentifier value to char.

I needed a char representation of a GUID field but couldn't retrieve it because of an obscure error :-s

Insufficient result space to convert uniqueidentifier value to char.

This was caused by a CAST as varchar without specifying the length (or a too short length).

Just using CAST(field as char(36)) solved the problem.