Question

I frequently get this error (it is so annoying!):

Error report: ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character
string buffer too small ORA-06512: at line 305
06502. 00000 – “PL/SQL: numeric or value error%s”

Example stored procedure is looping through a cursor (that has approx 10k rows), doing some logic and then using dbms_output.put_line to print each record to the 'Script Output' tab in Oracle SQL Developer.

Is there a way to flush out the the buffer or prevent this error coming up (and aborting the rest of the proc)?

If that is possible I could use the Mod function to clear the buffer every 10 or so rows processed.

Answer 1

The default buffer size of DBMS_OUTPUT is 20000 chars. You can up this with:

DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE(1000000);

There’s no concept of a “flush” as there is nothing to flush to until the stored procedure returns. The way it actually works is that the lines go into a buffer in the DB, then that buffer is explicitly fetched (with DBMS_OUTPUT.GET_LINES) by the client (e.g. SQL*Plus) when the SP completes. It is quite unlike printf() that you might be used to in C.