Last week, I posted a message with the said title. The problem seems to have been solved, unrelated to the PL/SQL code. We noticed not too far away in time from where we got: Oracle Error Message: ORA-12899: value too large for column "ODS_OWNER"."PATIENT"."CREATED_DATE" (actual: 8292, maximum: 7) there was always: ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [_intel_fast_memcpy.A()+10] Among many reports we found, one matches ours exactly, based on the error stack, the SQL type and the fact that we set a column to null: Note:737333.1 (Ora-07445 Dump Under Updgrh From Update Statement) "due to unpublished BUG 5868257 : Dump / memory corruption from UPDATE DML" The bug is fairly new and affects 10.2.0.4 only. We applied the patch last week. The busiest time of a week, Monday morning, already passed. We haven't had one incident of either ORA-7445 or ORA-12899. This time we're lucky we didn't have to read Designer code. Hopefully we'll never have to before the new app being built by a team replaces the current application. Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l