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

On 10 Nov 2006 08:48:32 -0800, "BD" <robert.drea_at_gmail.com> 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.

 Can you not use the CLOB datatype? This is the datatype to use when you need more than 4000 characters.

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Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
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