ORA-01843: not a valid month in Java application

Question

We have a Java Web application deployed in SAP Netweaver that accesses an Oracle 10g Database through plain JDBC. The application was working fine until a few days ago, when a query was causing the following error:

ORA-01843: not a valid month

The query that's giving us trouble is this:

SELECT *
FROM   (SELECT *
        FROM   (SELECT inspeccion.sociedad_id,
                       inspeccion_id,
                       estado_id,
                       (SELECT des_estado
                        FROM   estado
                        WHERE  estado.estado_id = inspeccion.estado_id)
                       des_estado,
                       (SELECT numero_secuencia
                        FROM   estado
                        WHERE  estado.estado_id = inspeccion.estado_id)
                       numero_secuencia,
                       planta_id,
                       (SELECT des_planta
                        FROM   planta
                        WHERE  planta.planta_id = inspeccion.planta_id)
                       des_planta,
                       area_id,
                       (SELECT des_area
                        FROM   area
                        WHERE  area.area_id = inspeccion.area_id)       des_area
                       ,
                       igp_id,
                       '-'
                       nom_lider,
                       nom_inspector,
                       nom_responsable,
                       To_char(fecha_inspeccion, 'DD/MM/YYYY')
                       fecha_inspeccion,
                       observacion,
                       recomendacion
                FROM   inspeccion) inspeccion) t_inspeccion
WHERE  estado_id NOT IN ( 10 )
       AND t_inspeccion.estado_id IN ( 11, 12 )
       AND t_inspeccion.planta_id = 42
       AND t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion >= To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy')
       AND t_inspeccion.sociedad_id = '0101'
ORDER  BY t_inspeccion.numero_secuencia,
          t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion

We were suspecting of the To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy') statement, but when we run the query trough DBVisualizer we have no trouble at all.

I'm kind of lost here. Maybe there's a DB Setting that's messing with the query, or some SAP Netweaver configuration? Or perhaps some Oracle Driver issue?

Answer 1

In the nested select that becomes t_inspeccion you have:

To_char(fecha_inspeccion, 'DD/MM/YYYY') fecha_inspeccion,

... and then in the outer where clause you have:

AND t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion >= To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy')

Assuming the original inspection.fecha_inspeccion is a date , you seem to be converting to to a string, then doing an implicit conversion back to a date to compare it to your fixed value. I suspect the implicit conversion of t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion is throwing the error, possibly from an unexpected NLS_DATE_FORMAT setting; which in Java is normally obtained from your locale. From the error I'd guess it's implicitly using MM/DD/YYYY, but could easily be something else.

I don't see why you had the to_char() at all though, unless you particularly want the text format in the results; in which case you need to either explicitly convert the date back in the where clause:

AND To_date(t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion, 'dd/mm/yyyy')
    >= To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy')

... or pull the original date column as well and compare using that; though that would perhaps need you to list all the other columns in the outermost select . If you are, or expect to be, using an index on fecha_inspeccion then you may also be degrading performance by treating it as a string.