The Designer displays two types of datatypes:
Because the transformation datatypes are generic, you can use different source and target platforms. For example, you can read information from an Oracle source and write it to a Sybase target. Likewise, you can read information from a flat file and write it to a Microsoft SQL Server database. The transformation datatypes appear in all transformations in a mapping.
When the Integration Service reads source data, it converts the native datatypes to the comparable transformation datatypes before transforming the data. When the Integration Service writes to a target, it converts the transformation datatypes to the comparable native datatypes.
When you specify a multibyte character set, the datatypes allocate additional space in the database to store characters of up to three bytes.