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

Question

When I try to query objects, I end up with following error:

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

Could someo

Answer 1

I had the same problem using PHP and prepared statements on a VARCHAR2 column. My string didn't exceeed the VARCHAR2 size. The problem was that I used -1 as maxlength for binding, but the variable content changed later.

In example:

$sMyVariable = '';
$rParsedQuery = oci_parse($rLink, 'INSERT INTO MyTable (MyVarChar2Column) VALUES (:MYPLACEHOLDER)');
oci_bind_by_name($rParsedQuery, ':MYPLACEHOLDER', $sMyVariable, -1, SQLT_CHR);

$sMyVariable = 'a';
oci_execute($rParsedQuery, OCI_DEFAULT);
$sMyVariable = 'b';
oci_execute($rParsedQuery, OCI_DEFAULT);

If you replace the -1 with the max column width (i. e. 254) then this code works. With -1 oci_bind_by_param uses the current length of the variable content (in my case 0) as maximum length for this column. This results in ORA-01461 when executing.