SQL & PL/SQL

So today at work this function has let me down. The client just wanted a simple redirection app, say something like tinyurl / bit.ly type thing. So I said hell yeah, Oracle can do that. But alas no! We soon noticed that our URL's are getting truncated to 130 characters.

I'm using latest version of Oracle 11R1 with Apex 3.2 on latest version of 64bit Redhat EL5.

I googled a bit and found some people blaming the browser, but this can't be the case because when I call the function without passing a parameter, but just putting in a literal string, it worked fine. Check this out...

owa_util.redirect_url('http://big.long.com/ginormous/path/with/lots/of/stuff/in/it/like/so/much/stuff/youll/be/all/like/that/url/is/too/long/anyway/so/go/away/noobtard');

That works fine. Look at the headers in the response and you'll see it's all good. However, try the following code and it fails...

l_redirect := 'http://big.long.com/ginormous/path/with/lots/of/stuff/in/it/like/so/much/stuff/youll/be/all/like/that/url/is/too/long/anyway/so/go/away/noobtard';
owa_util.redirect_url(l_redirect);

So once again, the doco lets me down. The only explanation I have is that there is some layer of sanitisation going on that is undocumented and doesn't like long URLs. I had a problem with setting headers which I posted under application server forums and got no useful response, so I'm hoping that here someone will at least be able to acknowledge this is a real problem and I'm not just insane.