ORA-01843:This is not a valid month error

Question

One of our french customer using Oracle 11g R2 on RHEL is getting following error while running a stored procedure:
ORA-01843: ce n'est pas un mois valide
20120123::05:41:10 ended rebuilding cmroll table
The error reported by ORACLE, in French « ce n'est pas un mois valide », means : « This is not a valid month ».I have asked him to verify the following settings on his machine:
Please run the following query on Oracle Server to get the NLS settings. It specifies the settings both on Oracle client and Server.
select * from nls_database_parameters;
select * from nls_instance_parameters;
However, you can override this setting by specifying the following environment variables in client or server. So kindly verify them  on both as well:
1.     NLS_LANG
2.     NLS_LANGUAGE
3.     NLS_TERRITORYIs there anything further that can help me to trace this error?

Answer 1

Moazzam wrote:
ORA-01843: ce n'est pas un mois valide
Is there anything further that can help me to trace this error?ORA-01843 Sounds a LOT more interesting in French :)
I have to agree with the others that there is a problem with the code somewhere - again, the implicit conversion sounds promising. Or possibly a language issue (hopefully not)
You should be getting a line number where the error is occurring. This can sometimes be deceptive; we use a WHEN-OTHERS exception handler but mark the code with a location marker throughout so we can look up errors and their locations in an exceptions table - in other words, the line cited in the error message may/may not be where the error happened. 11g sometimes reports errors on block headers too. There are other ways of finding the line the error is occurring on too, including just looking at the code (which is usually harder). Start by finding the line the error is occurring at.
The "brute force" approach (if possible find an easier way) is to either use the debugger in a GUI tool or use DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE to trace your way through executions.
When you find out where the error is occurring you can use DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE to display the value, find out what it is, and figure out what is causing the error, and fix it.
Edited by: riedelme on Mar 13, 2012 7:11 AM