ORA-12899 : Does it exist an option to truncate automaticly the data too...

Question

Hi,
I work on a migration project : Sybase to Oracle 10g.
There are a lot of request INSERT writed in Sybase with data too long to be insert in a table.
Example :
create table MyTable (txt varchar(10))
insert into MyTable values ('AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA');
So, i have lot of error ORA-12899 ...
With Sybase, there isn't error because the data are automaticly truncated.
Does it exist an option with Oracle to have the same behavior ? Without option, i have to add substr in many request.
Any idea ?

Answer 1

Here is another possibility you may want to consider,
1. make the column generously large, enough that you can be sure it accommodates the longest string.
2. load the data
3. once the data is loaded write a simple query that tells you the length of the longest string that got loaded in the column
4. alter the column to be of a more reasonable size considering step 3.
This way, no need to substr everywhere and truncate values that should not have been truncated in the first place. If you do need to end up truncating the values, it will still be easier to do it once the data is loaded in a table than it is to cherrypick statements to modify in script.
HTH,
John.