I have a text field on HDFS that can have a very long value of more than 4000 characters length.

I had to export this to Oracle using Sqoop. In Oracle table, this field is defined with data type VARCHAR2(4000 BYTE).

I get an error when Sqoop’ing.

Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

Why?

Oracle treats value longer than the defined limit for that field as LONG. Hence the error. The error is not very informative though.

Solution:

Use a CLOB datatype for that field on Oracle. CLOB can store value longer than 4000 characters.

Don’t forget to add –map-column-java option to Sqoop export command. As there is no COLB type in Java/Hive. Hive has to know how to treat this value. Full command is shown below.

sqoop export --connect jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:1521/sid \
   --username user --password passwd \ 
   --table Oracle_Table_Name \
   --columns col1,col2,col3 \
   --map-column-java col3=String \
   --export-dir 'location' \
   --input-fields-terminated-by '\001' --input-lines-terminated-by "\n" \
   --input-null-string '\\N' --input-null-non-string '\\N'