CA Service Management

We are wondering if there is any mechanism to increase the size of the Description field for any ticket type beyond the 4000 character limit.  

Before we try to increase to more than 4000 chars maybe we need to consider some side effects...for example, does the patch install/upgrade make it back to 4000? Or any description that long should go to the ticket attachments and refereed in the description?

If an upgrade or patching reverts changes back we are Ok with that as long as we can re-implement the solution.  If you're intimating that the proper procedure should be for anyone with a long Description to add the whole thing to an attachment it wouldn't be our preference.  Note if I paste a 20,000 character set of text into the Description it displays it just fine.  It also saves the ticket just fine.  However it truncates the Description and doesn't alert the user in any way, shape or form.  Poorly implemented, if you will.  The ticket recipient only finds this out after the fact then has to manually track down the submitter to get the information.  Then both the submitter and recipient silently curses both me and the solution.

There is this consideration, still valid for 17.1 as far as I know: 

Generate message when truncating ticket Description field 

There is some earlier discussion (including some custom code) here which may still be relevant (although the code would be unsupported by CA Support):

• Description truncation in SDM 14.1 Cum2
• SDM, version 12.7 - Truncate ticket description field

According to our existing documentation:

How to Modify Schema Using Web Screen Painter - CA Service Management - 17.1 - CA Technologies Documentation 

You cannot use WSP to change the length of an existing column, and we strongly recommend that you do not use other tools to do so. Changes to the length of an existing column are not supported, and may cause other applications accessing the CA SDM database to fail.

The reason for this is that Service Desk assumes a baseline schema design that is common across implementations.  Any patches introduced that could modify the schema may roll back or even cause unexpected results if such a change was introduced to a given field defined by the Service Desk initial install.

A common approach to work around this is to create a separate field whose size would accommodate for your requirements, and have the original field hidden from access.  

Another thing to keep in mind is that SQL Server does have a limit to row length as well.

SQL Server 2016 Maximum Bytes/Row - Database Administrators Stack Exchange