ORA-01406: fetched column value was truncated

I just got a dump file of our data from a vendor that is hosting an application for us and I was making it available to my developers and since we will be getting files on a somewhat frequent basis, initially I created an external table to read the data.

I had to get over the first hurdle of version incompatibility of the datapump file, which wasn't too bad, but after I cleared up those issues (lots of references on google, this chart helped the most) I received the following error in Toad:

ORA-01406: fetched column value was truncated

with further details

fetched column value was truncated

Cause: In a host language program, a FETCH operation was forced to truncate a
character string. The program buffer area for this column was not large enough to
contain the entire string. The cursor return code from the fetch was +3. 

Action: Increase the column buffer area to hold the largest column value or perform
other appropriate processing.

Google wasn't as helpful with this (hence the post here), but essentially this is a client side setting that needs to be adjusted. In version 10.6.1.3 of Toad there is one setting that needs to be changed. Search for "OCI Array Buffer size" or find it under "Oracle - General". You need to change it to be large enough to fetch the largest column in the query. In my case I had a column of size 4000, so setting this to 4000 returned results.