Re: SQL*Plus Copy Command Question

I think the main difficulty is that Oracle utiltities view spaces as nulls. A single space can be a valid piece of data. Old time COBOL programmers use spaces as data all of the time. A value of null is different as I understand it. Oracle seems to contradict itself. One of the responses to the original question was to use a query like the following:

Insert into local_table select * from remote_source_table;

This works fine (except in my case response was pretty slow due to use of a database link to the source table which was on another server). On the other hand, the following statement produced an ORA1400 message complaining about mandatory not null:

copy from remote_database to local_database - insert local_table using select * from remote_source_table;

I referenced the same tables in both statements. The first statement works fine while the second one doesn't. I'm fairly new in the Oracle world, but it seems like this is an inconsistent implementation. In the first instance a space is recognized as a valid piece of data. In the second instance it isn't. I have noticed the same problem with SQL*Loader. Received on Fri Sep 15 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST