Nasty Oracle/Java 5 Bug
- By Matt Stephens
- January 15, 2007
Users of Oracle (via Oracle’s JDBC driver) who are considering moving their development to Java 5 – or 6, for that matter – should think carefully before doing so. As reported on JavaLobby, a driver bug was recently discovered which lops a zero off the end of any values returned from a NUMBER column. The bug was discovered in Oracle 9, but also appears to be present in 10.
Initially, it looked as if there wouldn’t be a fix until the release of Oracle 11g – which given the glacial speed with which companies tend to upgrade their databases (a good thing, in and of itself), would have meant it would be 2010 at least before the fix would be out there in the field. Luckily though, Oracle’s product management team has confirmed that this issue will be fixed in the upcoming 10.2.0.4 and 10.1.0.x patchsets. (Specifically, they’ve logged it as bug # 5527479).
But in the meantime, of course, the bug exists for any users of Oracle 9 upwards using Java 5 or 6, who are using the default Oracle drivers. So tread carefully!