ORA-14060 or ORA-14265 when modifying column definition (Doc ID 330964.1)

Symptoms

You are trying to modify a column, for example:

• changing a CHAR or VARCHAR2 column from BYTE semantics to CHAR semantics (or the other way around)
• changing the length of a column (either a number of of a (var)char column).
• etc. etc.

Because this column is used as a partition key, this change is not allowed and you receive:

ORA-14060: data type or length of a table partitioning column may not be changed

Alternatively when modifying a subpartition key, you would receive:

ORA-14265: data type or length of a table subpartitioning column may not be changed 

This is also a possible problem when doing a character set change from single byte to multi byte ( AL32UTF8 typically) or from UTF8 to AL32UTF8 and there are partition keys in the database that contain columns defined with character length semantics .
There cannot be any (sub)partition keys who use CHAR semantics seen the byte lenght "behind the scene" changes during the character set change and the alter database/Csalter or DMU tool will fail.

This select will give all partitioned tables using char semantics columns:

Changes

You are trying to change the definition of a column that acts as a (sub)partition key.

Cause

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