We are encountering problems when trying to read lobs from a UTF8 database. If NLS_LANG is set to AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1 everything works fine. However, if NLS_LANG is set to AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8 we get the following error in our program: ORA-03130 the buffer for the next piece to be fetched is required
In this case, BytesPerCharacter is set to 1 byte so I wasn't surprised by the result. However when I set up a simple test case using just the DOA session defaults and setting bytes per character to auto detect I got an access violation. We are currently using Version 3.4.6.1 March 2002. (We do have version 4.x for testing purposes.) Opening the same table using PL/SQL developer version 6.0.3.893 seems to work fine however. I sell one other series of posts that seen to indicate a similar problem but I wasn't sure what the final resolution was. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
-- Greg

A few more he says of information that may help. The problem does not occur in Version 4.0.6.2 (September 1, 2004 )which was the last one I downloaded, but not in production software. When the AV occurs it occurs in the OCILobGetLength call of TLOBLocator.GetLength. Our DBA pointed out that the NLS_CHAR_SEMANTICS on the database being tested is not byte its char. Hope this helps.
Thanks,
-- Greg

Do you know where in TLOBLocator.GetLength the AV occurs?