Okay, please forgive me for this, but I don't have access to an Oracle database. That was quite a few years ago and I'm trying to dust off memory cells. I hope I get this right. I would really like to post the code to do the appropriate conversion, but can't even try it without an Oracle database. In short, I'm going off memory here. :w00t:

I don't think TO_CHAR will get you what you're after, since the field is already a Varchar2. So what if you used SELECT CAST(source_file AS Varchar) in the Oracle SELECT? Does the value survive the transfer? If the original value is anything but a string string type, this should equalize things out.

I don't know of a situation that causes the '???' in the SQL Server field other than characters being populated that aren't appropriate for the data type. I'm thinking it's because on the Oracle side of things, the data type being fed to SQL Server isn't known by SQL Server, so it just populates '???' instead of throwing an error.