[cx-oracle-users] NLS_LANG, (NC)LOBs, and ORA-01403

[Glyph L. <gl...@tw...>]

Hello cx_ers,

I have two database servers.  One is for local development ("dev") and one is a remote testing database ("test").

Both work fine with an NLS_LANG environment variable unset or using ".US7ASCII".  But then, of course, I can't read or write any non-ASCII data without getting encoding errors.

So, I set NLS_LANG to ".UTF8".  Against dev, everything works fine.  But, against test, I get a strange error.  When I attempt to .read() a LOB object (specifically, one which represents a NCLOB column), I get an ORA-01403 "no data found" error.

Strangely, dev's database character set is AL16UTF16 (i.e. it requires transcoding from the wire input coming from my program) but test is UTF8; in other words, the wire and database encodings match for test, so if anything I would expect it to work _better_.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?  Is it a bug in cx_Oracle?  Is there another value i could use in NLS_LANG to work around it?  The only thing that I can find which discusses such an error is this rather oblique reference: <http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B25006_02/repca.1012/repca/ts.htm#BABEFBFA>.

Thanks for any and all help,

-glyph