Another day, another Data Services issue. This time the error message was “Too many table names in the query. The maximum allowable is 256.” Turns out this is caused by my organization’s use of Sql Server 2005 rather than Sql Server 2008. Unfortunately, it’s not very feasible to reduce the number of tables being used as that number is dependent on the query being made against the ADO.NET Data Services web service by an end user. And as there are very valid reasons to make queries that require many tables it doesn’t make sense to place limits even if they were feasible.
See the object named “Tables per SELECT statement” for each version of Sql Server…
Maximum Capacity Specifications for SQL Server 2005 (256)
Maximum Capacity Specifications for SQL Server 2008 (Limited only by available resources)