SQL Error: ORA-12899: value too large for column

ORA-12899: value too large for column "DJ"."CUSTOMERS"."ADDRESS" (actual: 25, maximum: 2

Tells you what the error is. Address can hold maximum of 20 characters, you are passing 25 characters.

As mentioned, the error message shows you the exact problem: you are passing 25 characters into a field set up to hold 20. You might also want to consider defining the columns a little more precisely. You can define whether the VARCHAR2 column will store a certain number of bytes or characters. You may encounter a problem in the future where you try to insert a multi byte character into the field, for example this is 5 characters in length but it won't fit into 5 bytes: 'ÀÈÌÕÛ'

Here is an example:

CREATE TABLE Customers(CustomerID  VARCHAR2(9 BYTE), ...

or

CREATE TABLE Customers(CustomerID  VARCHAR2(9 CHAR), ...

This answer still comes up high in the list for ORA-12899 and lot of non helpful comments above, even if they are old. The most helpful comment was #4 for any professional trying to find out why they are getting this when loading data.

Some characters are more than 1 byte in length, especially true on SQL Server. And what might fit in a varchar(20) in SQLServer won't fit into a similar varchar2(20) in Oracle.

I ran across this error yesterday with SSIS loading an Oracle database with the Attunity drivers and thought I would save folks some time.