title: Import dmp file created in Oracle 11g (WE8ISO8859P1) to Oracle 11g XE database (AL32UTF8)
body: <p>I am regularly given a dmp file that gets created using oracle v.11g (using the exp utility).</p>
  
  <p>I used to import this file to the Western European edition of Oracle 10g XE.
  The import would terminate successfully without warnings but there was an error log (alert_xe.log) that would contstantly increase in size because I was using the the 32 Bit Oracle Database on a 64 Bit Windows OS.</p>
  
  <p>I have now installed 11g XE and I am trying to import the same dmp file but I am seeing the following in the import log file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import done in WE8MSWIN1252 character set and AL16UTF16 NCHAR character set
  import server uses AL32UTF8 character set (possible charset conversion)
  export client uses WE8ISO8859P1 character set (possible charset conversion)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the import terminates with warnings as I have a lot of the following errors:</p>
  
  <pre><code>IMP-00019: row rejected due to ORACLE error 12899
  IMP-00003: ORACLE error 12899 encountered
  ORA-12899: value too large for column XXX (actual: 256, maximum: 255)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I understand that the cause of the problem is that the source database is using byte semantics and my new 11g XE database is using multibyte character set.</p>
  
  <p>I have no control over the source database so I cannot change anything there.</p>
  
  <p>Moreover I cant pre-create the tables with columns definitions using character length semantics over byte semantics (as indicated here for example <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18420177/character-set-in-oracle-11g-r2-xe">Character set in Oracle 11g r2 XE</a>) as somethimes the source database schema gets changed (columns might get added) and I am not notified so that breaks the import.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a solution to this problem?
  Is there any way to use WE8MSWIN1252 with Oracle 11g XE?</p>