Skip to main content

inserted value too large for column - in a delete?

One of the well know error everyone meets in Oracle is the ORA-01041: inserted value too large for column (while s/he is cursing Oracle why it did not returned ORA-12899: value too large for column ... with the details).
The error is usualy right - you tried to insert a value too large for the column definition, so Oracle rejects the statement. Although it mentions insert, one can understand such error for updates, too.

But recently I got this issue for a delete statement. And no, there was not any trigger nor other advanced feature doing an insert in the background. So why on Earth, why?

The application (apply process of Dbvisit Replicate) was using OCI and the error indeed came from the OCIStmtExecute call. As it turns out, however, the devil is somewhere else.

One of the confusing topic in OCI is string handling - there are four ways how to pass a string to Oracle, depending on whether it's null-terminated or length-specified and whether it should be space-padded (think about CHAR/VARCHAR2 semantics):
  • SQLT_CHR: varchar2-style, length-specified
  • SQLT_STR: varchar2-style, null-terminated
  • SQLT_AFC: char-style, length-specified
  • SQLT_AFV: char-stype, null-terminated
  • (and a few more for LONGs, RAWs and a different API for LOBs)
The application uses SQLT_AFC, as the data it gets are fed directly from the source database, so no padding magic is required (even worse, the values do not match for some data combinations with SQLT_CHR due to the padding). However, for some strange historical reason, the CHAR() datatype is limited to 2000 bytes - and this carries over to SQLT_AFC, although this is not mentioned in the OCI documentation. What's even more interesting, this happened only when the value was specified as UTF16.

And yes, this is exactly the reason for the ORA-01041 - binding a 4000 bytes string to SQLT_AFC and setting OCI_ATTR_CHARSET_ID to OCI_UTF16ID did result in "inserted value too large for column" when the statement was executed...

Versions: Linux 64-bit, Oracle 10.2 and 11.2, using Oracle Instant Client 11.1.0.7.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid

I was asked to analyze a situation, when an attempt to recover a 11g (standby) database resulted in bunch of "ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid" errors. I tried to reproduce the error on my test system, using different versions (EE, SE, 11.1.0.6, 11.1.0.7), but to no avail. Fortunately, I finally got to the failing system: SQL> recover standby database; ORA-00279: change 9614132 generated at 11/27/2009 17:59:06 needed for thread 1 ORA-00289: suggestion : /u01/flash_recovery_area/T1/archivelog/2009_11_27/o1_mf_1_208_%u_.arc ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-27048: skgfifi: file header information is invalid ORA-00280: change 9614132 for thread 1 is in sequence #208 Interestingly, nothing interesting is written to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multitenant and standby: recover from subsetting

In the previous post we learnt how to exclude a PDB (or a datafile) from the standby database recovery. Of course, that might not be the real end goal. We may just want to skip it for now, but have the standby continue to be up-to-date for every other PDB, and eventually include the new PDB as well. Again, standard Oracle pre-12c DBA knowledge is helpful here. These files are just missing datafiles and thus a backup can be used to restore them. The new 12c features add some quirks to this process, but the base is just sound backup and recovery. Backup So let's start with a proper backup: rman target=/ Recovery Manager: Release 12.1.0.2.0 - Production on Mon Nov 16 12:42:38 2015 Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. backup database; connected to target database: CDB2 (DBID=600824249) Starting backup at 16-NOV-15 using target database control file instead of recovery catalog allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1 channel ORA_DISK_1: SID=193...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multitenant and standby: subsetting

In the previous post we looked at managing new PDBs added to a standby database, by copying the files to the DR server, as required. However, there is another possible approach, and that is to omit the PDB from the standby configuration altogether. There are two ways of achieving this: 1. Do it the old-school way. A long time before 12c arrived on the scene one could offline a datafile on the standby database to remove it. The same trick is used in TSPITR (tablespace point-in-time recovery), so that you don't need to restore and recover the entire database if you are only after some tablespaces. 2. 12.1.0.2 adds the option to automatically exclude the PDB from standby(s). And 12.2 adds the option to be more specific in case of multiple standbys. For the sake of curiosity I started by setting standby file management to manual again. What I found is that there was very little difference, and the steps to take are exactly the same - it’s just the error message that is slightly ...
Post a Comment
Read more