Oracle Database error ORA-01461 occurs while trying to insert a value in the DESCRIPTION column of WORKITEM table

The maximum limit of varchar2 data type in Oracle databases is 4000 bytes or chars. When IBM Security Identity Manager tries to insert a value larger than 4000 bytes or chars, an ORA-01461 error occurs.

This is a known limitation when using Oracle as an IBM Security Identity Manager database.

The action text specified on any manual activity node, such as approval and RFI, is stored in the DESCRIPTION column of the WORKITEM table. This column is defined to be a type varchar2(4000) for an Oracle database. The Varchar2 column in IBM Security Identity Manager uses Byte semantics as the default. The NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS value in Oracle is Byte, unless specified explicitly as a Char. When IBM Security Identity Manager tries to insert a value greater than 4000 bytes in the DESCRIPTION column of the WORKITEM table, an ORA-01461 error occurs. Because the maximum limit of varchar2 data type in Oracle is 4000 bytes, the size of this column cannot be increased.

The workaround is to avoid inserting more than 4000 bytes for this column. Because IBM Security Identity Manager internally uses about 50 bytes, the user can specify a maximum of about 3950 bytes of action text. The number of characters that can be specified in action text depends on the character set from which the characters are used. IBM Security Identity Manager internally uses UTF-8 encoding, so the maximum length of description depends on the number of bytes used by UTF-8 to store those characters.