Load conversion options

The following table lists the conversion options for the LOAD TABLE statement in alphabetical order and gives a brief description of what each option does. For a detailed description of each option, see the sections that follow. To use these options in the LOAD TABLE statement, see “Specifying load options”.

**Table 7-5: Conversion options for loading from flat files**
Option	Sybase IQ Data types	Action
ASCII	TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT (or INTEGER), UNSIGNED INT, BIGINT, UNSIGNED BIGINT, NUMERIC (or DECIMAL), REAL, DOUBLE, BIT, DATE, TIME, TIMESTAMP (or DATETIME)	By default, Sybase IQ assumes input data is binary of appropriate width for the data type. Using ASCII allows you to tell Sybase IQ that data is in character format and lets you specify how wide it is. This option allows E notation for REAL data, but it can hinder your performance.
ASCII	CHAR, VARCHAR	By default, Sybase IQ assumes same column width between source and destination columns, which may cause it to read input file incorrectly. This option lets you specify a different width for the input column.
DATE	DATE	Converts ASCII date input of a fixed format to binary.
DATETIME	TIMESTAMP (or DATETIME) or TIME	Converts ASCII time or date/time input of a fixed format to binary. The input specification is based on either a 12-hour or 24-hour clock.
TIME	TIME	Converts ASCII time input of a fixed format to binary.
NULL	all	Lets you specify which input data values to convert to NULL on insert.

When loading from a flat file, use binary data if you have a choice of using binary or character data. Using binary input can improve performance by eliminating conversion costs.