Load Conversion Options

There are several conversion options for loading from flat files using the LOAD TABLE statement.

Option	SAP 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, SAP Sybase IQ assumes input data is binary of appropriate width for the data type. Using ASCII allows you to tell SAP 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 might degrade performance.
ASCII	`CHAR, VARCHAR`	By default, SAP Sybase IQ assumes the same column width between source and destination columns, which may cause it to incorrectly read the input file. 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.

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