More reasons to hate Oracle...
time to read 1 min | 128 words

There is the straight and narrow, and then there is everything else. For instance, I was passing this command with 'select * from customers;', using OracleClient, and I got the following error 'ORA-00911: invalid character'.

The maddening part is that it knows what the invalid character is, but it won't tell me. Trying the exact same command in SQL*Plus worked, of course.

In the end, after much hair pulling and nearly a day down the drain, I tried this command 'select * from customers', which worked. Can you spot the difference?

It the bloody ';' in the end! It cannot process that so it throws some generic errors and goes fishing! Would it have pained Oracle greatly to pass along the actual invalid character? Most other databases at least try 'error near Foo...'

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