ORA-01467: sort key too long

Hello everyone,

I am having a strange problem. A query that I am running on our production database is giving me "ORA-01467: sort key too long" error message. One of the selected fields is datatype varchar2(2000). The query returns 20 records with the varchar2(2000) field occupying full 2000 characters. To create the same environment on the development database, I inserted new records such that for a given where condition the query returns about 20 records with that field occupying 2000 characters. However, when we run the same query on the development database, we are not getting this error message. Any ideas??

Thanks..

Tansel

The query is as follows:

SELECT
"PROFILE_NOTES"."PROFILE_NO",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."NOTES_NO",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."NOTES", <------ varchar2(2000)
"PROFILE_NOTES"."AGENT_NAME",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."CREATE_ID",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."CREATE_DATE",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."MAINT_USER_ID",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."MAINT_DATE",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."SOURCE_NO",
"PROFILE_NOTES"."PRODUCT_NO",
"PRODUCT"."PRODUCT_NAME",
"SOURCE"."SOURCE_NAME"

    FROM "PROFILE_NOTES",   


         "PRODUCT",   

         "SOURCE"  

   WHERE ( ( "PROFILE_NOTES"."PROFILE_NO" = 137483 ) )   and
         ( profile_notes.source_no = source.source_no (+)) and  
         ( profile_notes.product_no = product.product_no (+))