Running our new grails app on HSQL and a Postgresql everything went fine. But the production DB was decided to be an Oracle. And suddenly the app crashed several times. Here’s a list of what problems we encountered:
- ORA-00972: identifier is too long
- want to store a null value in a non null column
Oracle identifiers are limited to 30 characters. So we thought using a mapping for the table should do the trick. But grails uses the table names to construct the n:m relations and their id column names between the domain classes. Looking at the grails docs we found a joinTable mapping:
static mapping = {
table 'PROP'
tablePerHierarchy false
instrumentInfos joinTable: [name:'PROP_INS', key:'id', column:'instrumentInfos_id']
}
This worked most of the time but in some cases grails just didn’t want to take our definitions. The problem was a bug in grails. The workaround we took was to shorten the domain classes names.
The second problem arose as we tried to store empty strings into the database. Oracle stores empty strings as null values which causes a constraint violation exception. The solution was to declare the string columns nullable or not nullable and not blank but you cannot use a not nullable and blank string with an Oracle DB.
Schneide Blog 