Remember back in the JDK 1.5 days when some genius changed BigDecimal.toString and broke half the universe? I’ve felt the impacts in DB2, Oracle, VoiceObjects, and other places. I’m over that now (and all the cool kids have updated or switched to toPlainString), but this thing just keeps coming back to haunt me.

Like this week, when old DB2 JDBC (JCC) drivers kept showing up on some platforms, prompting these intermittent errors:

[ibm][db2][jcc][converters] Overflow occurred during numeric data type conversion of …

This error can sneak up on ya’ because it often takes just the right numbers to kick in. Like the lottery, and sometimes with the same odds.

Fortunately, the fix is easy: just update JDBC drivers to something from the modern era.