ORA-01704: string literal too long

Cause: The string literal is longer than 4000 characters.

Action: Use a string literal of at most 4000 characters. Longer values may only be entered using bind variables.

On DBA Support.com Forums, many questions have been raised concerning ORA-01704.

In one case, 'isaac' asks why he is still receiving ORA-001704 "when doing an SQL update statement in SQL*Plus and also executing an SQL query in ColdFusion." using the following SQL statement:

update mkt_page_links
set longdescription = ' {some html text > 4000 char} '
where menuidno = 310;

The response informed 'isaac' that ORA-01704 was occurring as he executed the SQL statement:

In SQL the max of varchar2 is 4000 bytes and hence the error. Modify your code snippet to something like the following and it should work. (it becomes a pl/sql program).

Furthermore, when running ColdFusion, a query should be run the following to avoid ORA-01704:

<cfquery name="upd" datasource="#request.site.MainDSN#">
UPDATE MKT_Page_Links
SET LongDescription = <CFQUERYPARAM VALUE="#DataString#" CFSQLTYPE="CF_SQL_CLOB">
WHERE MenuIDNO = #form.ID#
</cfquery>

In this example, 'isaac' resolution lay in the parameter that ColdFusion has which can convert variables to CLOB datatype.

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