But if there are no records in the table, I'm doubting that is the case here. I agree with what's been said so far - check the trace files. Also, if this is just a table, perhaps worth doing an analyze table restrizione validate structure cascade; Stephan Uzzell From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sheehan, Jeremy Sent: Tuesday, 22 March, 2011 09:08 To: niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx; jose.soares@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: RE: ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel We saw this before when invalid data got entered into a field. There was a number field that somehow had a special character entered and every time the field was queried it gave us this error. Took all night to figure out. Jeremy From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 7:50 AM To: jose.soares@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: Re: ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel ORA-03113 means your session and the server process have stopped talking. This shouldn't happen in your situation. Of course if you have further complications (like it's not a table but a complex view, or there's a VPD function or....) then there maybe a specifc bug/issue that you hit. In either case the trace files mentioned earlier should give you more info On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:08 AM, jo <jose.soares@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:jose.soares@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote: Hi all, Does someone know what this error mean? "end-of-file on communication channel" I have the following table, with no rows stored: name | data_type | nullable | data_default | data_length --------------- + --------- + -------- + ------------- + ----------- COD_MALATTIA | NVARCHAR2 | Y | NULL | 20 COD_MATRICE | NVARCHAR2 | Y | NULL | 20 COD_NAZIONE | NVARCHAR2 | Y | NULL | 6 DATA_FINE | DATE | Y | NULL | 11 DATA_INIZIO | DATE | N | CURRENT_DATE | 11 ID | NUMBER | N | NULL | 38 ID_MACELLAZIONE | NUMBER | N | NULL | 38 I tried these queries: select count(*) from restrizione where COD_MALATTIA is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione where COD_MATRICE is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione where COD_NAZIONE is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione where DATA_INIZIO is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione where ID is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione where ID_MACELLAZIONE is not null count(*) -------- 0 select count(*) from restrizione count(*) -------- 0 but this one raises the error select count(*) from restrizione where DATA_FINE is not null ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel Only when I use DATA_FINE column in the WHERE clause it raise the error. what's wrong with this column? Thanks for any help. j -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info