Hello All The actual problem turned out to be a mismatch between binding styles. One of the processes reads the XML for the SQL query. The query was set to Binding Style Oracle. The process then adds a "WHERE (col1 = ? and col2 = ?);" clause to the select statement. As the Binding Style had already been set to Oracle the '?' notation causes the error. Crucially the process and the XML were set to different binding styles.As noted above, the JDBC driver could handle both, but not at the same time. Solution: Be consistent. Thanks for all the replies Ray -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l