Evening Elizabeth,
Toad etc don't need to convert as they are selecting the LONG data in it's
entirety. Similar to how they can show a NUMBER without converting using
TO_CHAR() - these utilities fetch the data into local variables in whatever
language they are written in - C, Delphi etc - so an Oracle LOND (or VARCHAR2
etc) will be converted into a C char[] or similar 'on the fly'.
LONGs are a monumental PITB when you want to do anything with them.
This blog post might help show you how to convert to a CLOB, which you can then
use DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR etc to slice up.
https://ellebaek.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/converting-a-long-column-to-a-clob-on-the-fly/
There are some less frantic solutions in PL/SQL at
https://www.toadworld.com/platforms/oracle/b/weblog/archive/2014/05/20/long-to-clob-conversion-constraint-conditions-and-database-d-i-y
- near the end - it looks like PL/SQL does implicit conversions. Test and see
how you get on.
Finally, I had a similar problem myself looking for broken check constraints
which suffered from a similar LONG problem. As the amount of data was small, I
created a temporary table as described at
http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/blog/2016/08/dropping-temporary-tables-with-bonus-broken-check-constraints/
HTH
Cheers,
Norm.
On 16 January 2018 19:46:07 GMT+00:00, "Reen, Elizabeth "
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We are trying to create a sql which will create a script of partitions
to compress which are older than a certain date. That information is
kept in High_value. When displayed high_value looks like this
TO_DATE(' 2017-01-01 00:00:00', 'SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS',
'NLS_CALENDAR=GREGORIAN')
So the first thing we did was to query where high_value like
'TO_DATE%'. We got an invalid character error. Long story short, we
discovered that high_value's data type is long. There must be a way to
translate this into text. SQLplus, Sqldeveloper, and TOAD all do that.
The question is how do they do it? Does anyone know how it is done?
Thanks,
Liz
