TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIMEZONE. Never again.

Let me guess, did you get hit with more than one 3:00am?

Let's not forget that Oracle DB uses the system timezone as the datatype storage (not sure what other database do to be honest) so unless you were running your DB machine as UTC by default their timestamp storage would be ambiguous for DST shift and that's their default. Why wouldn't they store everything in UTC and use the system timezone for parse/formatting I have no clue.

I've been pushing to run ALL servers as UTC for a few decades now... always store/transmit date+time as UTC as well. If it's mapped to a locale, pair it with that locale... let the client translate to/from local.

Oh sorry, are you looking to insert 4001 characters in your varchar2? Buckle up kids, things are gonna get rough.

Or maybe 3999 chars, of which a couple are two-byte. More fun.

Oracle supports up to 32k VARCHARs since 12.1 released back in 2013.

It just needs to be enabled: https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/REFRN/GUID-D424D23B-093...

varchar1 was varchar. I should say "is", since varchar is still supported, they just recommend varchar2 since varchar "might change" (probably not...)

That one actually changed already. If you follow the new recommendations, varchar is as good as varchar2.

Good to know! I haven't had to touch an Oracle database in almost 15 years, but one never knows.