Oracle : Resolving ORA-29275: partial multibyte character

Data might sometimes get corrupted and when accessing can result in error:

In case data volumes are huge, its difficult to pin point the row which is causing this. Though, there is strategy for doing this.

sql > set autotrace traceonly statistics
sql> execute query (select column from table)

This will show you how many rows are processed before the error occured.
e.g.

22787220 rows selected.
.
Statistics
----------------------------------------------------------
6295 recursive calls
0 db block gets
65041120 consistent gets
10050575 physical reads
0 redo size
4195673524 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
10634511 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
1519151 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
108956 sorts (memory)
0 sorts (disk)
22787220 rows processed

So, you can create an duplicate table and delete these many rows ,i.e., 22787220 records using rownum.

then you again run the query and check how many further records are selected before corrupt data is encountered. This way you can single out the data which is causing issue. Generally this kind of data corruption occurs as a result of DB upgrades.

How to fix:

A simple straight way is to delete the record. but that means loosing information.

Following could be done to resolve this:

update table set column=column||'';

i.e., append empty string to the column and that is it...data corruption is fixed without any loss of it.

similar exercise can be done for number type columns. they generally result in end-of-file on communication channel.

you can check the corruption of it by dumping its canonical form.

sql >select column, dump(column) from table.
---- --------------------------------------------------
1 Typ=2 Len=21: 193,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1

actual dump should have been "193,2", no trailing "1"s.

these records also can be updated to get them return to normal canonical form.

update table set column=column + 1 - 1;

Oracle : storing strings in multibyte character format

Creating tables using varchar2 datatype by default allocates specified value in bytes. That means if one is storing multi-byte character then you may not be able to store all the characters as some character might be multi-byte i.e taking 2 bytes per character.

We can store multibyte charater strings with specified number of characters using CHAR along with the varchar2 datatype. e.g
Create table lingual ( text varchar2(2o) CHAR);

this way you can store up to 40 bytes or 20 multibyte characters in column text.

To find out how many characters a column of a row has, use length() function. This will return the number of character, multibyte or single byte.

Use lengthb() to determine the number of bytes the column value contains.