Question

I have some tables in Access that I’m trying to export to csv so that I can import to Oracle. I don’t use the export via ODBC because I have 70K – 500K records in some of these tables and that feature takes way to long as I have about 25 tables to do so I want to export to csv (which is much faster) then load via sqlldr.

Some numeric columns can go out to 16 decimal places and I need them all. However when I export they only go out 2. I’ve done some googling around this. Regional settings only allows 9 decimals out (Win XP), formatting the column via a query will change it to text which I don’t want when I import to Oracle (maybe I can use to_number() in the control file?).

Why is this so difficult? Why can’t Access just export numeric columns as they are?

Answer 1

In my Access 2007 test case, I’m not seeing quite the same result you described. When I export to CSV, I get all the decimal places.

Here is my sample table with decimal_field as decimal(18, 16).

id some_text decimal_field
-- --------- ------------------
 1 a         1.0123456789012345
 2 b                          2

Unfortunately, those exported decimal_field values are quoted in the CSV:

"id","some_text","decimal_field"
1,"a","1.0123456789012345"
2,"b","2" 

The only way I could find to remove the quotes surrounding the decimal_field values also removed the quotes surrounding genuine text values.

If quoted numeric values are unworkable, perhaps you could create a VBA custom CSV export procedure, where you write your values to each file line formatted as you wish.

Regarding “Why is this so difficult?“, I suspect decimal data type as the culprit. I don’t recall encountering this type of problem with other numeric data types. Unfortunately, that’s only my speculation and won’t help even if it’s correct.