Re: ORA-01467: sort key too long

From: Keith Boulton <boulkenospam_at_globalnet.co.uk>
Date: 1998/01/30
Message-ID: <34d25785.772329@read.news.global.net.uk>#1/1

On Tue, 27 Jan 1998 16:08:43 -0500, Tansel Ozkan <tansel_at_openix.com> wrote:

>Yes, you are right. The production database has a db_block_size of 2K
>while the development has 4K.
>
>However, one thing I still don't understand is that this large field is not
>
>part of the sort key. What is meant by sort key? Isn't it the column
>by which the records should be sorted?
>

Sorry I misunderstood your initial message and took it to mean that you were sorting by the 2000 character column.

I looked in the error messages manual and found Cause: A DISTINCT, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, or SET operation requires a sort key longer than that supported by Oracle. Either too many columns or toomany group functions were specified in the SELECT statement. Action: Reduce the number of columns or group functions involved in the operation.

I think the sort key is the columns you are sorting by, plus maybe a rowid.

The oracle server reference manual has the following limit on group by operations.

The group-by expression and all of thenon-distinct aggregates (e.g., sum,avg) need to fit within a single database block.

which may have been what I was thinking of. Received on Fri Jan 30 1998 - 00:00:00 CST