aaabbbbcccddddggghhhh
The data file illustrated previously has three records. Each record has a field of three characters followed by a field of four characters, so the total record length is seven characters. The file does not contain any separation between records; delimiters are unnecessary because all fields have the same length. The VARCHAR data types are therefore always the fixed maximum size of the field.
When you define a fixed-length format, you specify the length of each field. The ipload utility calculates the offset for each field and the total length of the record from the field lengths that you supply.