Forum: LRCM

There are actually two separate issues:

1. How Oracle stores data, and
2. How the laptop displays data.

How Oracle stores data is established at database creation.
How the laptop displays data is set up in the laptop's operating system.

Setting NLS_LANG is the way we tell Oracle how we want the laptop to display data. Oracle, using the information in NLS_LANG, will then know how it should convert data from its stored form each time a user (using the laptop) asks to see some data.

The problem that you have is as follows:

• The server's Oracle database stores data in a way that every character takes 1 byte of space.
• But the laptop database stores data in a (newer) way so that some characters take 2, 3, or 4 bytes of space.

The import utility knows how the data was stored in the source and how it should be stored in the laptop. So it does the conversion. Some characters will be converted from one byte of storage space to two or more bytes. Naturally, there will sometimes not be enough storage space allocated in the target database. This is the error you got. Obviously, setting NLS_LANG (how data is displayed) will not take care of this storage related problem.

Oracle needed to solve this problem with the advent of multi-byte characters.

Solution:

SQL> alter system set nls_length_semantics=char;
Restart the database.

From now on Oracle, not we, will worry about the actual physical space of the column. We just specify (in create or alter table) the number of characters (as we always did in the single byte world). As long as the column width is sufficient to store the specified number of characters (regardless of their individual byte sizes) the load will succeed.