Re: "Safe" copying from one table column to another

gerald_klima_at_maxmobil.at wrote:

> While writing a small PL/SQL program (ORACLE 7.3) I encountered the
> following problem: How do I copy a VARCHAR2 field from one table column
> to another, assuming that the two columns can be of different length and
> I don't want to hardcode the column lengths in my sourcecode (I don't
> want to change my sourcecode if the column definitions change). e.g.
> emp1.name is defined as VARCHAR2(30) emp2.name is defined as VARCHAR2(20)
> and I want to copy emp1.name into emp2.name (which of course raises a
> VALUE ERROR upon direct assignment if LENGTH(emp1.name) > 20), with
> emp1.name truncated on the right. I could not find any SQL function which
> returns the defined maximum length of a VARCHAR2 datatype.
>

max varchar2 size for oracle 7 is 2K, for oracle8 is 4K.

to find out the "length" of that data use the length command. to find out the size of the field definition get it from user_tab_columns.

joe

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