When programming with Pro*C, you can retrieve up to the first 70 characters of any Oracle error messages using the SQLCA structure. However there are times when you need the full text of the error message. My project had run into this need last year. For some reason the developers could not figure out how to do this. I wish they had read the Oracle Pro*C Programmer's Guide. It explains exactly how to do this. You need to call the sqlglm() function.
I could go through how you can use the sqlglm function. However I recommend you just consult the Oracle Pro*C Programmer's Guide. Isn't it like a developer to not read the manual? There is no excuse for this. Oracle provides the documentation free of charge on the web.
This reminds me of another huge problem I encountered this year with multi threaded applications having trouble managing multiple database contexts. At lot of high power developers thought up many theories about what our problems were. And there was a lot of guesses on how we could solve the problem. None of the guesses panned out. Luckily I read up the Pro*C Programmer's Guide and employed the Pro*C functions to explicitly manage database contexts for threads. Problem solved. Maybe I will give an example of how I did this in the future. The Pro*C Programmer's Guide is a good start. But it lacks some detailed examples.
