Re: The need to 'get around' the 4000 character limit in varchar2

BD wrote:
> I was approached by a developer this morning, who has a SQL server
> database that needs to be transferred to Oracle.
>
> The SQL database has a few columns that are varchar columns, and are
> longer than 4000 bytes.
>
> At this point I know of no way to migrate this data across to Oracle
> directly, because of the 4000 byte limit.
>
> I've done some reading in the archives on *why* the limit exists, and I
> acknowledge the chained rows and I/O issues.
>
> I also stumbled across an article in which someone 'got around' the
> limitation by splitting the field into several fields, and using a view
> to concatenate the data, as in 'select text_field1 || text_field2 from
> split_field'...
>
> I presume that DBAs have encountered the need to supply more than 4000
> characters in a single field in the past, and am curious as to what
> strategies might be used to accomplish this.
>
> Comments welcome.
>
> Tx!

Move it to a CLOB.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org