"Copy To Oracle" failed if column sequence is different

Question

Hello,
I am trying to use the "Copy to Oracle" function to copy data from MSSQL 2008 to Oracle 11g. Since I already go the table created on Oracle and thus, I only need to migrate the data.
But I realize that, the copying failed, due to the column sequin between source and destination is different.
E.g. Table A on MSSQL has the column (id, phone, address) but the same table on Oracle is created in the order of (id, address, phone)
It seems to me that the data copying is done with column_id, instead of column_name.
What's your suggestion to get around with the issues? I would take re-creating the table as the last resort as there are like hundreds, if not thousands of tables I am talking about.
Many thanks!
ronnie

Answer 1

Hi Ronnie,
It seems to me that the data copying is done with column_id, instead of column_name. Not exactly. The documentation says:
Note that if the two tables with the same name do not have the same column definitions and if Include Data is specified, the data may or may not be copied, depending on whether the source and destination column data types are compatible.
I have created a table in my SQL Server database of that kind:
create table t1 (id integer, phone char(100), address char(100));
And I inserted one record:
id phone address
1 This is the phone number This is the address
In my Oracle database I created the table so:
create table t1 (id integer, address char(100), phone char(100));
The I used COPY TABLE (with the option APPEND) and the result in Oracle is this:
ID ADDRESS PHONE
1 This is the phone number This is the address
So the data are copied. Because the type of the fields ADDRESS and PHONE are identical. But the data are at the "wrong" place.
I dropped my table in SQL Server, recreated it and inserted 1 record:
create table t1 (id integer, phone integer, address char(100));
id phone address
2 12345 This is the address no.2
I changed the table in Oracle accordingly:
create table t1 (id integer, address char(100), phone integer);
I repeated the COPY with option APPEND. But nothing is copied. Because the data types do not fit.
I hope that makes the behavior clearer. Though, I have no idea how you can avoid the problem in any other way than recreating your table on Oracle side so that the columns fit together.
Regards
Wolfgang