Import & NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS

I’ve been importing some data from an export of the production 8i instance to a 10g development instance.

This includes some multibyte data (for a little more on that see previous post).

However, if I just import the data then some of the rows are rejected because the length is too long for the column.

This sounds like a NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS thing whereby the column definitions of the tables concerned should be CHAR rather than BYTE.

I thought that if I changed the NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS setting for the database, then the import might create the tables with CHAR column lengths. But it didn’t, understandably probably.

So, the only alternative seems to be to create an indexfile from the import and edit it so that the column definitions are CHAR. And then manually create them. I need these reverse engineered creation scripts anyway, I suppose.

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