sync-hcat-schema-types.md
Hive STRING and BINARY data types are matched, in Vertica, to the VARCHAR(65000) and VARBINARY(65000) types. Adjust the data types with ALTER TABLE as needed after creating the schema. The maximum size of a VARCHAR or VARBINARY in Vertica is 65000, but you can use LONG VARCHAR and LONG VARBINARY to specify larger values.
Hive and Vertica define string length in different ways. In Hive the length is the number of characters; in Vertica it is the number of bytes. Thus, a character encoding that uses more than one byte, such as Unicode, can cause mismatches between the two. To avoid data truncation, set values in Vertica based on bytes, not characters.
If data size exceeds the column size, Vertica logs an event at read time in the QUERY_EVENTS system table.