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.

NoteWhen 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.