At 09:40 PM 20/12/2006, you wrote:

>Yes! Looks like an implicit hard-coded limitation or a bug. I've done
>some experiments with that record and discovered this:
>1) update cms_wiki set u_text = substring(text from 1 for 16383) where
>id = 15; - works well.
>2) update cms_wiki set u_text = substring(text from 1 for 16384) where
>id = 15; - fails with the exception: "Cannot transliterate character
>between character sets".
>
>This is the text fragment, which crosses 16384th byte:
>"... In spite of simplicity, ...".
>Character #16384 is a space (ASCII 32) between "of" and "simplicity".
>
>Did I miss something in the documentation? Or it has no relation to the
>original problem, because of limitation of the SUBSTRING() itself?

Substring indeed must be a legal varchar, i.e. not exceeding 32765
***bytes***. Your update is converting up to 16 384 single-byte
characters to 2-byte characters. In UTF-8, this means that the
transliteration will work up to and including character number 16 382
and will overflow when it tries to transliterate the next input character.

As to why your script is hanging on an overflow, I don't see an
obvious reason for that. You are correctly getting an exception when
running the statement interactively. What are you doing differently
in your script? Or perhaps it is not an isql script you are using
but some admin tool that is set to ignore exceptions..?

./heLen