If you are using multi-byte character sets (e.g. Chines or Cyrillic) in your business processing, then those characters might need to be persisted in the Spring Batch schema. Many users find that simply changing the schema to double the length of the VARCHAR columns is enough. Others prefer to configure the JobRepository with max-varchar-length half the value of the VARCHAR column length is enough. Some users have also reported that they use NVARCHAR in place of VARCHAR in their schema definitions. The best result will depend on the database platform and the way the database server has been configured locally.