Migrate CHAR columns to VARCHAR for transaction tables on Oracle

About this task

If you are migrating CHAR columns to VARCHAR columns on Oracle, perform this migration.

The *.done file created in the 9.3 status folder for the migrate-char-to-varchar task is transaction_ant_char_varchar_migrator.xml.done.

Note: It may take a large amount of time to upgrade all tables effected by the CHAR to VARCHAR feature. You can reduce the amount of time for this migration by following one or both of these methods:
  • Drop the indexes of the table before running the migrator, and then rebuild the indexes after migration.
  • Increase the number of records updated per commit. In the <INSTALL_DIR>/Migration/9.3/migrator_char_varchar.xml file, adjust the CommitCount attribute of the SQLMigrate element based on the number of records in that table. For example, if a table has 130 million records and you increase the CommitCount to 1 million, the migration takes about 16 hours. However, if you increase the CommitCount to 10 million, the migration takes about 2.5 hours. These results are measured on the hardware specifications described in Release 8.5 migration estimate.