ORA-01704: string literal too long when migrating database - sql

Question

I migrate some data from a database and get it in a data.xml file
Example:
<insert tableName="ORG_CUSTOMER">
<column name="My-Column" value="a very long string.."/>
</insert>
I then execute it with a cmd command
call ..\liquibase\liquibase-bin\liquibase.bat --changeLogFile=%DATA% --defaultSchemaName=NAME_DBA --defaultsFile=liquibase-local.properties update
And because the value sometimes is longer than 4000 characters i get the error:
Unexpected error running Liquibase: ORA-01704: string literal too long
The column is of value clob. The autogenerated xml file contains a lot of inserts I would prefer to not edit it manually. I read something that making it a prepared statement or using pl/sql will work but I don't now how to do that?

Answer 1

Oracle - by default - has a limit of 4000 byte for string literals.
If you are on 12.1 or newer you could raise that limit to 32k.
If you are using an old version or can't change the parameter, you can't use Liquibase's <insert> change.
You could try the <loadData> change and hope it uses a PreparedStatement, in that case the limit doesn't apply:
http://www.liquibase.org/documentation/changes/load_data.html

Answer 2

Without the code of liquibase.bat it is difficult to say but.
From the documentation on literals:
Text literals have properties of both the CHAR and VARCHAR2 datatypes:
Within expressions and conditions, Oracle treats text literals as though they have the datatype CHAR by comparing them using blank-padded comparison semantics.
A text literal can have a maximum length of 4000 bytes.
I would guess that the script is naively converting the XML from:
<insert tableName="ORG_CUSTOMER">
<column name="My-Column" value="a very long string.."/>
</insert>
To
INSERT INTO {tablename} ( "{column.name}" ) VALUES ( '{column.value}' );
and this will fail when the text literal has more than 4000 bytes.
To fix this you will need to edit the script to handle CLOB values with more than 4000 bytes (where you cannot use a text literal).