I ended up creating a view of the Oracle table using the TO_CHAR function on the problem columns that were defined as VARCHAR2. I then just use a linked server to Oracle. You could also use the TO_CHAR function directly in your query if you did not want to create the view.

SELECT * FROM OPENQUERY(LinkedServer,'SELECT to_char(gbaid)

FROM PRODDTA.F0902

WHERE gbfy = 99

')

Regards.