oracle error ORA-01461 when persisting entity with special characters in absurdly specific circumstances

[Felk]

Describe the bug

In some absurdly specific circumstances, trying to persist an entity containing the string Nêin will cause the following error when connected to an oracle database:

ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for insert into a LONG column

This looks more like a hibernate bug than a quarkus bug, but creating a reproducer with quarkus is way easier, because it requires an actual oracle database, which is trivially availabe using dev services.

Let's say we have this entity:

@Entity
@Data
@NoArgsConstructor(access = AccessLevel.PROTECTED) // for JPA
public class MyEntity {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;

    @Column
    Boolean someBool;

    @Column
    String someString;

    public MyEntity(Boolean someBool, String someString) {
        this.someBool = someBool;
        this.someString = someString;
    }
}

and a JDBC batch size of at least 2 (e.g. setting quarkus.hibernate-orm.jdbc.statement-batch-size to 2). Then, running this code will result in the aforementioned error:

MyEntity entityOk = new MyEntity(null, null);
MyEntity entityBorked = new MyEntity(true, "Nêin");

entityManager.persist(entityOk);
entityManager.persist(entityBorked);
entityManager.flush(); // ERROR! ORA-01461

The absurd thing isn't even that the error looks completely unrelated, but that these little changes all fix the problem:

• Using other special characters, e.g. stuff like "äöüßÄÖÜẞ💩"
• Slightly changing the string's size, e.g. "Nêi" and "Nêin_" both work
• Using the decomposite unicode normalization "Nêin" (e + 0x0302 "COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT")
  instead of the composite form "Nêin" (0x00EA "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX")
• Not having a JDBC batch size > 1, or flushing in-between the two inserts
• Changing the order in which the two entities are persisted
• Removing the random additional nullable boolean field
• Not having the Boolean be null for one and not-null for the other entity,
  e.g. true->false or false->true makes the test pass
• not having the first entity's string be null

I have attached a reproducer project: quarkus-nein-reproducer.zip

Output of java -version

OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Temurin-17.0.2+8 (build 17.0.2+8, mixed mode, sharing)

Quarkus version or git rev

3.2.2.Final (broken starting with 3.1.0, fine with 3.0.4)

Build tool (ie. output of mvnw --version or gradlew --version)

Apache Maven 3.8.2

[quarkus-bot]

/cc @DavideD (hibernate-reactive), @Sanne (hibernate-orm,hibernate-reactive), @gavinking (hibernate-reactive), @gsmet (hibernate-orm), @mswatosh (db2), @yrodiere (hibernate-orm)

[marko-bekhta]

hey @Felk
Thanks for reporting the issue. It looks though that the problem goes beyond Quarkus or even Hibernate ORM 😄. See this test I've created here marko-bekhta/hibernate-test-case-templates@663bf6c.

The error happens if you try to do this with a simple prepared statement. It is only reproducible with a combination of com.oracle.database.jdbc:ojdbc11:23.2.0.0 driver and gvenzl/oracle-free:23 Oracle DB. If a previous version of a driver is used (21.10.0.0) it works fine with gvenzl/oracle-free:23 too. Or if the DB image is changed to gvenzl/oracle-xe it works fine with both drivers.

3.2.2.Final (broken starting with 3.1.0, fine with 3.0.4)

Quarkus 3.1.0 upgraded the driver to com.oracle.database.jdbc:ojdbc11:23.2.0.0 from com.oracle.database.jdbc:ojdbc11:21.5.0.0 so that explains why it started to fail.

As a workaround, you could downgrade the oracle driver.

[Felk]

Thanks for narrowing the problem down further! Downgrading the driver back to 21 worked.

I couldn't find an official place to report oracle database or jdbc driver bugs to Oracle, so if it's okay with you I'll try posting on their forums with a link to this issue and your reproducer, and close this one as it's not Quarkus' fault. Does that sound good?

[yrodiere]

Hey @Felk , LGTM, thanks!

Please remember to post a link to your post here, so that others facing the same problem can follow progress on the Oracle side of things :)

Closing as this is not strictly caused by Quarkus, and I expect a fix in the Oracle JDBC driver will take some time.

[Felk]

I've posted on their forum: https://forums.oracle.com/ords/apexds/post/oracle-error-ora-01461-when-persisting-entity-with-special-2651

[Felk]

This is properly fixed now in Quarkus due to #41998 which updated the Oracle JDBC driver to 23.4