Is this really an out of memory error?

Question

I get the following output from running the pl/sql script below. I can't believe this is an actual out of memory error because the query involved returns only 51 rows. If I run the cursor query from the command line it takes about 5sec and returns 51 rows. The server this is running on is doing nothing else. We successfully run pl/sql scripts that use huge amounts of memory on this server and have never seen this error.
Any idea what could be going on here?
SQL> exec test_obis_admin.find_invalid_dates('royals_census_1984')
find_invalid_dates
year collected=1953
year collected=1953
year collected=1953
year collected=1953
year collected=1953
year collected=1953
year collected=1983
year collected=1983
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1972
year collected=1972
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1996
year collected=1972
year collected=1972
year collected=1976
year collected=1976
year collected=1976
year collected=1976
year collected=1976
year collected=1976
BEGIN test_obis_admin.find_invalid_dates('royals_census_1984'); END;
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 16396 bytes (koh-kghusessi,pl/sql vc2)
-- find and identify rows containing invalid date component
PROCEDURE find_invalid_dates ( res_name varchar2 ) IS
     date_temp DATE ;
     CURSOR date_components IS SELECT
     a.id,
     a.yearcollected,
     a.monthcollected,
     a.daycollected,
     a.startyearcollected,
     a.startmonthcollected,
     a.startdaycollected,
     a.endyearcollected,
     a.endmonthcollected,
     a.enddaycollected
     FROM expandeddigircache a WHERE a.res_name=res_name ;
     date_fields date_components%ROWTYPE ;
BEGIN
     print('find_invalid_dates') ;
    OPEN date_components ;
    LOOP
        fetch date_components into date_fields ;
        exit when date_components%NOTFOUND ;
        print('year collected=' || date_fields.yearcollected ) ;
   END loop;
    CLOSE date_components ;
END find_invalid_dates ;\

Answer 1

As it turns out this probably was a genuine out of memory error. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, I accidently ran the exact query from the pl/sql procedure.
     CURSOR date_components IS SELECT
     a.id,
     a.res_name ,
     a.yearcollected,
     a.monthcollected,
     a.daycollected,
     a.startyearcollected,
     a.startmonthcollected,
     a.startdaycollected,
     a.endyearcollected,
     a.endmonthcollected,
     a.enddaycollected
     FROM expandeddigircache a WHERE a.res_name=res_name           I was expecting 51 records, I got considerable more before the out of memory error occurred.
     I believe the query as written returns everything in the table. In this case 20mil+ records.
     The fundamental problem was that the parameter to the procedure was called res_name and the where clause tested a column called res_name. pl/sql did not consider them two different names. So I think the net result was a where clause of the form WHERE 'a'='a'
     When I changed the parameter name to p_res_name and the where clause to WHERE res_name=p_res_name the procedure worked as expected.