Documentation for JIRA 4.4. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

Atlassian support for Oracle 8 officially ends with the JIRA 3.6 release. Oracle 8 users are advised to upgrade to avoid the problem described on this page.

Applies to:

Oracle 8 users

Oracle has a 4000 character limitation on its VARCHAR2 field type. This causes problems for JIRA, which uses VARCHAR2 to store comments and 'workflows'. Whenever a comment or workflow exceeds 4000 characters (very easy in the case of workflows), JIRA breaks.

Oracle have a workaround for this problem in their 10g JDBC driver, which can be used with Oracle 9 and 10. Use of this workaround has been incorporated into the documentation.

This doesn't help Oracle 8 users. A workaround for the problem of > 4000 character workflows in Oracle 8 is to store these on disk, instead of in the database. This can be done as follows:

  1. Run JIRA Standalone (with hsqldb database) to construct the workflow, and then:
  2. Export the created workflow as XML, and save this to disk, eg custom-workflow.xml
  3. In the JIRA instance that will use Oracle, edit WEB-INF/classes/workflows.xml and add a line: 
    <workflow name="custom" type="resource" location="custom-workflow.xml"/>
    Where 'custom' is the workflow name.
  4. Copy custom-workflow.xml to WEB-INF/classes/
  5. Restart JIRA. The 'custom' workflow should appear in the list of available workflows.
  • No labels



See our Getting Help page for details.



Raise an issue for our developers.



See answers from the community.



Tweet, blog and update our documentation.

Except where otherwise noted, content in this space is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.