Garbage appearing when displaying Oracle character fields

Hi,
I am having troubles with character fields being displayed as garbage characters in Reporting Services. I have a shared data source defined as "Oracle" not "OLE DB" going against an Oracle 9i database. When I run a query in the Wizard Query Builder (which I hear uses the OLE DB connection to Oracle) the characters display correctly without any garbage characters. When I run the query in the Generic Query Builder (which I hear uses the Oracle data processing extension) the character fields display with garbage in them. Also, when I view the data in the data layout under the Preview tab, I get the garbage characters. The garbage characters appear on the second or following rows, in which the prior row had the same value in that field. The fields can either be defined as varchar2 or char in Oracle of more than 1 character in length. varchar2(1) and char(1) data types seem to display correctly without the garbage. The problem also shows up when I deploy the report to the ReportServer and view it in the ReportManager.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks!
MelindaI found out that our issue was that we were using the Oracle 8.1.5 client to connect to an Oracle 9i database. This was causing garbage characters to appear in our reports. Once I upgraded to use the Oracle 9.1 client, it worked as expected. I did some digging and found a small line in the documentation that suggests the minimum client is Oracle 8.1.7 or later.
"Melinda" wrote:
> Hi,
> I am having troubles with character fields being displayed as garbage characters in Reporting Services. I have a shared data source defined as "Oracle" not "OLE DB" going against an Oracle 9i database. When I run a query in the Wizard Query Builder (which I hear uses the OLE DB connection to Oracle) the characters display correctly without any garbage characters. When I run the query in the Generic Query Builder (which I hear uses the Oracle data processing extension) the character fields display with garbage in them. Also, when I view the data in the data layout under the Preview tab, I get the garbage characters. The garbage characters appear on the second or following rows, in which the prior row had the same value in that field. The fields can either be defined as varchar2 or char in Oracle of more than 1 character in length. varchar2(1) and char(1) data types seem to display correctly without the garbage. The problem also shows up when I deploy the report to the ReportServer and view it in the ReportManager.
> Does anyone have any ideas?
> Thanks!
> Melinda