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

From: BD <robert.drea_at_gmail.com>
Date: 10 Nov 2006 08:48:32 -0800
Message-ID: <1163177312.262178.203680@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com>

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! Received on Fri Nov 10 2006 - 10:48:32 CST