Selecting LONG type

[toddyl]

Hi,

I have a table and one of the columns, say x, is of type LONG. I can do a select a, b, c, x from my_table and have no problems in getting the data I require.

I now want to output this to a csv file so I set spool to a file, say output.csv and run the following:

spool ../../output.csv
select a||','||b||','||c||','||x
from my_table;
spool off;

When I run this I get an oracle error:

ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected NUMBER got LONG

Can anyone help me in extracting this data to csv format.

Thanks.

 

[Dagon]

Yes, LONGs are notoriously useless, which is why they have been replaced by CLOB and BLOB. The only way I've ever found to manipulate them is to use PL/SQL and retrieve the long into a large PL/SQL variable (32k). You can then output it to a file using UTL_FILE or write to another intermediate table. You will still have problems if the LONG is > 32k.