How to fix the Oracle error ORA-12716: Cannot ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET when CLOB data exists?

In this post, you’ll learn more about the Oracle ErrorORA-12716: Cannot ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET when CLOB data exists with the details on why you receive this error and the possible solution to fix it.

Oracle Error Description

ORA-12716: Cannot ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET when CLOB data exists

Reason for the Error ORA-12716: Cannot ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET when CLOB data exists

CLOB data changes representation to Unicode when converting to a multibyte character set and must be migrated

How to fix the Error ORA-12716: Cannot ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET when CLOB data exists ?

You can fix this error in Oracle by following the below steps

Remove CLOB data as listed in the alert file. CLOB data can be migrated by methods such as import/export