Converting LONG to NUMERIC

Hello,

I made a mistake when defining one Oracle table: defined one of its columns as being of type LONG when it really should have been numeric. I thought "LONG" stood for "LONG INTEGER" and later learned it meant a string up to 2 GB in size.

Now the table has over 100,000 records and I wish to convert the data type of that column and keeping the data in the process...

What I tried, using SQL-Plus:

Creating a new table with the correct structure and populating it with the INSERT INTO statement. But that failed, "INCORRECT USE OF LONG DATA TYPE".

Creating a new table with only the primary key and the LONG column, and later use the UPDATE statement, with the TO_NUMBER function... this didn't work either, with the same message as above.

The only thing that seemed to work was creating a query in MS-Access to create  a new table with the PK and LONG field, so I could later update the new table, but due to the large number of rows, the query had to be interrupted after 5 hours of non-stop work...

If someone knows of some efficient way of recovering that data into a new table having the correct structure, please let me know...

Thanks in advance!

^ Cristian Lucas
^ From Buenos Aires, Argentina

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading Received on Thu Apr 09 1998 - 11:59:22 CDT