External Tables w/ non ASCII chars

[Nyrine]

Hi !

I have some external tables set up to load data into an oracle 9i database.

My table is created as :

create table XT405 (
.
.
XREF2 NVARCHAR2(50)
.
.
)
organization external (
type oracle_loader
default directory xtdir
access parameters (
records delimited by newline
fields (
.
.
XREF2 POSITION(452:46 3) char
.
.
)
)
location (xtdir:'XT405.d at')
)
reject limit unlimited;

Now, the table seems to work fine in most cases, however, I am getting rejected records when the data contains non-ascii chars, for example :

e pers. jurí -- the i with the accent.

I had hoped that using nvarchar2, with a size that was suitably large enough would allow this to load, but unfortunately not.

The actual error message I am seeing in the logs is :

KUP-04021: field formatting error for field XREF2
KUP-04101: record 7185 rejected in file /var/opt/vci/data/XT405.dat

By a process of repetition of editing my data and tables to remove one column at a time, if I remove this column it works, so I assume that this is the data causing the problem, and the only weird thing about the data is the accented char.

Can anyone offer an insight ?

M.