The Character or Numeric data must have a length of 256 bytes and be padded with blanks or binary zeros as needed.

The source column can only contain date or timestamp data.

The source column can contain date or timestamp data; character or numeric data may be used if a date format is applied to the AGE function.

The date format used in the Column Map must be entered in the format used by the database.

Column Maps cannot be used during Insert/Load, only during Convert.

No changes are made to the extract file, only to the rows as they are written to the database.

The original extract file remains unchanged, and a modified copy of the extract file is made with the Column Map specifications applied.

The original extract file is modified with the Column Map specifications.

Reduced maintenance costs because application and database maintenance and license fees are no longer paid for the old application and its database, but data remains accessible to the user community.

Decommissioned data is needed every day by end-users and Optim caches it in memory so access is faster then the production database.

Reporting from the application against the archived data can be cheaper using tiered storage.

Optim can store decommissioned data in a compressed format so it will take less storage then it did in production.

Applications must continue to use data in a seamless manner.