Why are Oracle table/column/index names limited to 30 characters?

Question

I can understand that many years ago there would be this kind of limitation, but nowadays surely this limit could easily be increased. We have naming conventions for objects

Answer 1

I was looking this up and found this question via Google, but also found out that as of Oracle 12c Release 2 (12.2), this is no longer strictly the case. (https://oracle-base.com/articles/12c/long-identifiers-12cr2)

At some point every DBA or developer will have hit a point where the 30 character limit for object names has caused a problem. This limit can be extremely painful when doing migration projects from SQL Server or MySQL to Oracle. In Oracle Database 12cR2, the maximum length of most identifiers is now 128 characters.

This is a new feature in 12.2, according to (http://blog.dbi-services.com/oracle-12cr2-long-identifiers/). According to that post, 12.1 was still limited to 30 characters.

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Edit: Here's a link to the official Oracle documentation explaining the change. (https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/exadataexpress-cloud/CSDBF/longer-identifier-names.htm#CSDBF-GUID-F4CA155F-5A37-4705-8443-0A8C9E3F875C)

Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), the maximum length of identifier names for most types of database objects has been increased to 128 bytes.