How to delete column from table containing LONG RAW?

Greetings:

I've hit a dead-end attempting to remove a column from a table that contains a LONG RAW column. I'm not trying to directly delete the column, of course; I've made a copy of the table that excludes the column I no longer need, and planned to transfer the old data to the new table by using an INSERT INTO command from the old table.

The problem is that the INSERT INTO command cannot include a LONG RAW column. Attempting to use the command in this way produces the following error message:

    ORA-00997: illegal use of LONG datatype

A call to Oracle tech support produced the information that INSERT INTO can't include a LONG RAW column (the documentation does not mention that). This means that I don't have a way to move the LONG RAW data to my new table.

The net result of this is that once a LONG RAW column is added to a table, no other columns can be deleted from the table. I find it incredible that such a limitation would be the case, but according to Oracle support, it is. (The database version is 8.0.5, BTW.)

If anyone here has a suggestion about how to move that data from the original table's LONG RAW column to the new table's LONG RAW, I would very much appreciate hearing it. Received on Wed Feb 02 2000 - 17:12:54 CST