Oracle vs HANA char data type handling

Question

We have Oracle as source and HANA 1.0 sps12 as target. We are mirroring Oracle to HANA with Informatica CDC through real-time replication. In Oracle, for many columns we have datatype as CHAR i.e. fixed length datatype. As HANA officially doesn't support CHAR datatype so we are using NVARCHAR data type instead of same. Problem we are facing is -as in Oracle CHAR datatype is of fixed length and append spaces whenever actual string is of lesser length than datatype, we have lot of extra spaces in target HANA db for such columns.

For eg. If column col1 has data type

CHAR(5)

and value as 'A', it is replicated in HANA as 'A ' i.e. 'A' appended by four extra spaces, causing lot of problems in queries and data interpretation

Is it possible to implement CHAR like datatype in HANA?

Answer 1

You can use RPAD function in Informatica while transferring data to Hana. Just make sure if Hana doesn't trim automatically.

So, for the CHAR(5) source column you should use:

out_Column = RPAD(input_Column, 5)

Pretty much exactly, as the documentation says: