What is Column Buffer area?

Question

What on earth is Column Buffer area? How do i increase it?
While issuing a simple SELECT query i received the error ORA-01406 fetched column value was truncated . It is a 9i Error. The solution for this mentioned in documentations is : Action: Increase the column buffer area to hold the largest column value or perform other appropriate processing .
The weird thing is , this query works on our sample database, Oracle version 9.2.0.5.0 . But it doesn't work in our client site on the same version (9.2.0.5.0) .
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I have an SQR that reads a CLOB field. I had one value returned that was > 12,000 bytes.
Apparently, the SQR db drivers can't handle an entire CLOB as a single column in a select statement. The trick is to break up the CLOB into chunks of 12,000 KB columns and combine them later in order for the SQR to handle it.
begin-select
clobfield
let $myclob = &clobfield
show $myclob
end-select
The above SQL would return an error:
(SQR 5528) ORACLE OCIStmtFetch error 1406 in cursor 18:
ORA-01406: fetched column value was truncated
Error on line 67:
(SQR 3725) Bad return fetching row from database.
To avoid this error, I used the following:
begin-select
substr(clobfield, 0, 12000) &clobfield1
substr(clobfield, 12000, 24000) &clobfield2
!Add more if your data will be > 24000 bytes
let $myclob = &clobfield1 || &clobfield2
show $myclob
end-select