Re: 8.1.5 - Dual gone schizoid

Thanks to all those that replied.

I got at least two responses that suggested that there was a little room for a server error to be causing the problem.

A couple of people pointed out the risk of getting 'extra' rows in the DUAL table through imports, accidental inserts, etc. This wasn't the case here - if you check back to the details posted:

        select 'constant' from dual;
showed exactly one row in the table from SQL Plus but more than one row from within PL/SQL and

        select count(*) from dual;
showed two rows in the table from SQL Plus

(This persisted even after the database had been bounced)

The database has been running perfectly for several months from intial install without any problems - the problem simply sprang into existence this morning. I have to admit that I was trying to break something at the time, but NOT in the SYS schema.

My big mistake on this one was to fix the problem before doing a block dump of
DUAL to see what the data block looked
like.

My quick fix was (as several people indicated)

    truncate table dual;
    insert into dual values ('X');

--

Jonathan Lewis
Yet another Oracle-related web site: http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk Received on Thu Dec 30 1999 - 14:46:53 CST