Copying LONGs between tables

In article <By89D6.BpI_at_well.sf.ca.us>, mharper_at_well.sf.ca.us (Michael J. Harper)  writes:
> I need to copy the contents of a table into another table. Sounds easy,
> right? Well, my problem is that one of the columns in the source table
> is bound to be a LONG or LONG RAW, and the following syntax:
>
> INSERT INTO NEWTAB
> SELECT COL_A, COL_B, COL_LONG
> FROM OLDTAB
>
> fails with the error message:
>
> ORA-00997: illegal use of LONG datatype

I too have been trying to achieve this using something other than COPY from SQL*Plus. I found, as Scott Stephens from Oracle points out, that it must be done by retrieving the value into a local variable and then inserting this variable into the new table. The trouble is that my copy facility must be generic and I do not want to dynamically allocate storage for a variable number of columns. It is, however, almost elegant to retrieve the long field seperately as with:

    Select long_col into :long_field from Oldtab where ...

and then copy the record as with:

    Insert into newtab(colA,colB,long_col) select colA,colB,:long_field     From Oldtab Where ...

Unfortunately, Oracle spews out a 1401 error ("Inserted value too large for column") when the field is larger than 255 characters. In my mind the above statements should be legal. I have not found anything in the manuals that would contradict this. I have contacted central support but if anyone can spot a valid reason this statement should not work or tell me about something similar that does work, please let me know. Thanks

-- 
Russ Bryant
russ_at_splunge.uucp
or kakwa!atlantis!splunge!russ