ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number with name "" too small

During one of the recent releases at work we ran into problems during performance testing of a new feature. This feature worked flawlessly in development and test environments but once hit with a heavy load, it started to manifest itself. Every now and then we'd get the following exception from the JDBC driver - ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number with name "" too small.

Oracle Support already has a document that covers this error and the many different causes and solutions for it - Master Note for ORA-1555 Errors (Doc ID 1307334.1), however none of those seemed to have been the cause for the issue in our case.

This was the stack trace we were seeing...

Exception

Caused by: java.io.IOException : ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number with name "" too small

ORA-22924: snapshot too old

at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleClobReader.needChars(OracleClobReader.java:252)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleClobReader.read(OracleClobReader.java:192)

at java.io.BufferedReader.fill(BufferedReader.java:161)

at java.io.BufferedReader.read(BufferedReader.java:182)

...

Caused by: java.sql.SQLException : ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number with name "" too small

ORA-22924: snapshot too old

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer11.processError(T4CTTIoer11.java:494)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer11.processError(T4CTTIoer11.java:441)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer11.processError(T4CTTIoer11.java:436)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4C8TTILob.processError(T4C8TTILob.java:758)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIfun.receive(T4CTTIfun.java:623)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIfun.doRPC(T4CTTIfun.java:252)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4C8TTIClob.read(T4C8TTIClob.java:249)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CConnection.getChars(T4CConnection.java:3954)

at oracle.sql.CLOB.getChars(CLOB.java:448)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleClobReader.needChars(OracleClobReader.java:235)

at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleClobReader.read(OracleClobReader.java:192)

at java.io.BufferedReader.fill(BufferedReader.java:161)

at java.io.BufferedReader.read(BufferedReader.java:182)

...

So the issue had something to do with CLOBs. After much investigation and collaboration we received some advise about removing the cache option from the CLOB column on the table that we knew was causing this issue.

The cache option can be checked with the following query...

SQL

SELECT cache, logging

FROM dba_lobs

WHERE table_name = 'your_table';

Originally this was set to YES in our case. To disable/remove the cache option, the following SQL was used...

SQL

ALTER TABLE your_table

MODIFY LOB (your_clob_column) (NOCACHE LOGGING);

After this statement was executed the cache option was disabled. In our case this made all of the ORA-01555 errors disappear. If it doesn't help you, refer to the Oracle support note mentioned at the start of this post.

-i