Character width exceeded

Question

I create a master table with column A, column B, and column C. Whenever I try to insert row from another table using the command:

INSERT INTO MASTER
select * from Table B

I get the error message "Character Width exceeded". I am not sure why.

[Netezza](http://www.netezza.com/) is a very popular data warehouse tool. It competes with Teradata. — DOK, May 29 '12 at 16:26
Compare definitions of `Master` and `TableB` tables. Some char or varchar field(s) probably differ in size. — Nikola Markovinović, May 29 '12 at 16:28
The error message is very clear. You are trying to insert values that have a bigger size than the destination — Lamak, May 29 '12 at 16:30

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 29 '12 at 16:30

0

May be the one or more column size of Table B is larger than the respective column size of MASTER.

For e.g. - Table B's column1 might be VARCHAR(255) and MASTER's column A might be less than 255.

answered May 29 '12 at 16:30

JHS

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I changed the varchar statement for the master table to varchar(40) – cool_cs May 29 '12 at 16:37
Make the columns of MASTER similar to that of Table B. – JHS May 29 '12 at 16:38
I can only see the type of variable not the number of characters – cool_cs May 29 '12 at 17:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 29 '12 at 16:32

0

Check if the structure of table MASTER is exactly the same as the table B.

Probably is a problem in which MASTER.colx is a string(20) and B.colx is a string(25), or may be is a charset problem (unicode/latin-1/utf-8/iso-8859-x)

answered May 29 '12 at 16:32

jperelli

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 29 '12 at 16:38

0

Consider creating the table MASTER as:

select *
  into master
  from tableB
 where 1=0

This will guarantee that the column datatypes are the same between the two tables. Then you can try your insert again.

answered May 29 '12 at 16:38

Stagg

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Character width exceeded

3 Answers3