Oracle column definitions / byte and char

[Georg Frueh]

TD41 ptf2, Oracle 10g

Normaly we create table columns in bytes like the following statement:
create table test1 (Column1 varchar2 ( 85 byte) );
In this case we can select the columns into a Stringvariable until 256 bytes.

Now a customer DBA create the table columns in Char:
create table test2 (Column1 varchar2 ( 85 char) );
Here we cannot select the column in a Stringvariable. We need an Long string because oracle reserves 3 byte per char.

Has anybody a solution or a workaround for this problem?

Thanks in advanced

Georg