I have recently had several reports start returning an Oracle error stating
that the sort key is too long. This report contains a field that had a description that can be up to 1000 characters long. There is no sorting that is being performed (other than the default sorting that BusObj does). If I remove the description field, the report runs just fine. Altering the database is not an option. Any ideas on how to handle this in BusObj? I am currently running version 4.1.2 of BusObj and version 7.3 of Oracle.
It doesn’t have to be an explicit SORT or ORDER BY that is causing this error. Oracle also has to sort the results when you do a DISTINCT or a GROUP BY … and the GROUP BY is quite common in BO. I found one Oracle error message related to “sort key”:
ORA-01467 sort key too long
Cause: A DISTINCT, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, or SET operation requires a sort key longer than that supported by Oracle. Either too many columns or too many group functions were specified in the SELECT statement.
Action: Reduce the number of columns or group functions involved in
the operation.
It sounds like from this description that your query simply has one too many columns in it, not that one particular column is too wide.
You could also try breaking the query up into two and linking them.