Today I started getting ORA-1406 errors from VERY well tested code.
Not tested well enough it seems. Some OCI library code that I wrote to simplify the task of fetching data was getting ora-1406 errors.
It turns out that OCI (or the calls that I use) does not take into account the local character set when advising on the maximum size of a column. My local charset was UTF8 but the databases was USASCII. I hit an (erroneous) hi bit character and it exceeded the size that I had allocated. If anyone knows how to ask OCI for how many bytes a field needs taking into account your local characte
