Heckroth Industries

Please don't truncate error messages

This morning I have spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what an error message was referring to. Cryptic error messages are one thing that you get used to dealing with, but this time it was different. The error message made sense but left you thinking that you had to add some more space to something but didn’t say what.

It turns out that the error message was from the underlying Oracle database, but that the software running the SQL against Oracle had truncated the error message. After reading through Oracles logs I discovered the end of the message which detailed which tablespace was in need of expanding. A couple of minutes later the tablespace was extended and it all started working

So if you output error messages from an underlying system, please don’t truncate them.

Programming
Jason — 2011-11-28