Informix Error -578

Reasons / Common Causes

-578 fires when an owner-qualified object name (owner.tablename for a table, view, index, or synonym) has an owner portion longer than the 32-character maximum — per the official guidance, most often the result of a punctuation slip rather than a genuinely long owner name.

1. A missing space or comma causing two separate names to run together, per the official guidance's specific example — what should have been two tokens gets parsed as one long owner name.
2. A copy-paste error concatenating an owner name with an adjacent identifier, from generated or hand-edited SQL.
3. An owner name genuinely intended to be very long, exceeding what any Informix identifier (owner names included) is allowed to be — rare, since OS usernames rarely approach 32 characters, but possible with certain naming conventions.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Review the punctuation and spelling of all identifiers in the statement, per the official guidance — look specifically for a missing space or comma that merged two names.
2. Check the names of all known owners, per the official guidance, by querying the owner column of the relevant system catalog for the object type involved:

   SELECT DISTINCT owner FROM systables;    -- for tables/views
   SELECT DISTINCT owner FROM sysindexes;   -- for indexes
   

3. Correct the qualified name once the punctuation issue (or the genuinely-too-long name) is identified.

Examples

A missing comma running two names together

SELECT * FROM customer_master_recordsarchive_2024.status, other_table;
-- -578: a comma was meant between 'customer_master_records' and
-- 'archive_2024.status' — merged together, the parsed owner name is
-- 36 characters, over the 32-character maximum

Corrected

SELECT * FROM customer_master_records, archive_2024.status, other_table;

Diagnostic Checks

1. Re-read the qualified name character by character for a missing space or comma, per the official guidance's specific example of this failure mode.
2. Query the owner column of systables/sysindexes to confirm which owner names actually exist, if the intended owner name itself is in question.

Related Errors / Related Topics

No closely related error codes are cross-referenced for -578 in this set yet.

Usually a punctuation slip merging two names into one long "owner," not a genuinely long owner name — check for a missing space or comma first.