Jay, I don't see where anyone responded to your posting, so I'll give less than expert opinion. So you're getting an "invalid number" error? Review this AskTom discussion. Apparently this ORA-01772 can occur in some strange ways. http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:45012348053 Since you say that flushing the shared pool seems to alleviate the problem for awhile, this problem might somehow be related to the shared pool getting fragmented. You might consider pinning this stored procedure in memory. Dennis Williams