NLS, Part Deux

A guest post today, by Brian Ledbetter, a co-worker at Agilex:

On a customer’s database, we ran across a table that would not migrate.  It was admittedly a log table, containing long chunks of HTTP header data, but whenever we tried importing it into our 11gR2 database, we ended up getting:

IMP-00058: ORACLE error 1461 encountered
ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

After looking at the table structure, the first thing we noticed was that there was a VARCHAR2(4000) column in the table.  Considering that this column was already the maximum size (in bytes) for a CHAR-based data type, it became the focus of our attention.

Looking online for solutions, we found references [1] suggesting that Oracle was implicitly converting this column to a VARCHAR2(4000 CHAR) type, creating a column that can contain up to 4 bytes per character.[2]  Because this overflows the 4000 byte limit on column length, Oracle then attempted to implicitly convert the datatype to a LONG VARCHAR2, which is apparently deprecated in 11gR2.[3]  (We’re not sure why Oracle is still trying to make this conversion, if that’s the case.)

Anyway, we tried precreating the table with a CLOB datatype, and that didn’t work either, so as a workaround, we created a copy of the table with the data trimmed to 1000 characters (leaving plenty of room after UTF8 conversion):

create tabname_migtmp as select col1, col2, substr(col3,1,1000) col3 from tabname;

We then used exp/imp to copy tabname_migtmp over to the 11gR2 server, and inserted the data from it into the final location.

insert into tabname select * from tabname_migtmp;

drop table tabname_migtmp;

–

[1] http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1038043

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5230346/char-semantics-and-ora-01461

[3] http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2230351

See Also: Technote 444171.1, https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=444171.1