thanks greg.

does the column have to be empty? if so is there anyway round this, the column has 185000 records in.

I tried the following:

alter table "text_messages_sent"

alter COLUMN "Action_Date" DATE

but get the error message:

ORA-01735: invalid ALTER TABLE option

am i missing something simple?

Thanks bill the problem was the matching columns are differant VARCHAR length's as you suggested.

Thanks SQLBill your a star.