ASCII to EBCDIC conversion

Question

Hi there!
I am working on an Oracle data extract project. My output file will send to a DB2 database and a mainframe application. In my file, some fields' type is COMP-3. I use Oracle build-in function convert () to convert to EBCDIC. This works fine in SQL*PLUS. But when I use it in my PL/SQL program, I got "ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character to number conversion error". Here is my program.
FUNCTION get_vd_pro_norm_mth_amt(p_account_rec IN ACCOUNT_ROW) return varchar2
as
v_scaled_amount               varchar2(15);
BEGIN
     select convert(a.scaled_amount, 'WE8EBCDIC500','US7ASCII')
     into v_scaled_amount
     from pin61_02.rate_bal_impacts_t a, pin61_02.rate_plan_t b
     where b.poid_id0 = a.obj_id0 and
          b.account_obj_db = p_account_rec.poid_db and
          b.account_obj_id0 = p_account_rec.poid_id0 and
          b.account_obj_type = p_account_rec.poid_type and
          b.account_obj_rev = p_account_rec.poid_type;
     return v_scaled_amount;
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
RETURN NULL;
END get_vd_pro_norm_mth_amt;
I guess the wrong data type of my variable v_scaled_amount generated the problem. I do not know which data type should I use to store EBCDIC data.
Thanks a lot!
Max

Answer 1

try with nvarchar2.
NVARCHAR2
You use the NVARCHAR2 datatype to store variable-length Unicode character data. How the data is represented internally depends on the national character set specified when the database was created, which might use a variable-width encoding (UTF8) or a fixed-width encoding (AL16UTF16). Because this type can always accommodate multibyte characters, you can use it to hold any Unicode character data.
The NVARCHAR2 datatype takes a required parameter that specifies a maximum size in characters. The syntax follows:
NVARCHAR2(maximum_size)
Because the physical limit is 32767 bytes, the maximum value you can specify for the length is 32767/2 in the AL16UTF16 encoding, and 32767/3 in the UTF8 encoding.
You cannot use a symbolic constant or variable to specify the maximum size; you must use an integer literal.
The maximum size always represents the number of characters, unlike VARCHAR2 which can be specified in either characters or bytes.
my_string NVARCHAR2(200); -- maximum size is 200 characters
The maximum width of a NVARCHAR2 database column is 4000 bytes. Therefore, you cannot insert NVARCHAR2 values longer than 4000 bytes into a NVARCHAR2 column.
You can interchange VARCHAR2 and NVARCHAR2 values in statements and expressions. It is always safe to turn a VARCHAR2 value into an NVARCHAR2 value, but turning an NVARCHAR2 value into a VARCHAR2 value might cause data loss if the character set for the VARCHAR2 value cannot represent all the characters in the NVARCHAR2 value. Such data loss can result in characters that usually look like question marks (?).
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Joel P�rez