ODCIIndexStart error in Spatial Index Advisor

Question

Folks,
I am getting the following error when attempting to zoom in on a layer in the spatial index advisor:
Initialization error: server object could not be initialized
ORA-29902: error in executing ODCIIndexStart() routine
ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error
ORA-06512: at "MDSYS.SDO_CS", line 236
I have seen similar sorts of complaints from a number of people in the forums but no clear explanation of what is causing the problem or how to resolve it.
I did a bunch of experiments and I have come to the conclusion that the problem only occurs with layers that have 3 dimensions and are geodetic. If I force a projected SRID to be used for the layer (and all component geometries) then the problem goes away. Or if I force the layer to be only 2D then it works fine.
I have also tried using "geodetic=false" and "sdo_indx_dims=2" when creating the spatial index, and these did not seem to help at all.
The problem is occuring for me in the spatial index advisor, but my understanding from my client is that it also occurs in other contexts, so I don't think this is specifically a spatial index advisor problem.
I would add that I believe I am running 9.2.0.1.0 on Windows XP.
I found I was able to reproduce the problem creating an indexing a layer as follows then opening it in the spatial index advisor and trying to zoom in:
-- Cleanup
drop index idx_test1 force;
drop table test1;
delete from user_sdo_geom_metadata where table_name = 'TEST1';
--Here's my table:
CREATE TABLE test1
PNT_ID NUMBER(17) NOT NULL,
ORA_GEOMETRY MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY
--Here's my insert:
INSERT INTO test1
VALUES ( 1, MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY(
3001, 8192, MDSYS.SDO_POINT_TYPE(60.8996766, -32.606364, 0), NULL, NULL
COMMIT;
-- of course I did the insert into the metadata table...
INSERT INTO USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA
VALUES (
'TEST1',
'ora_geometry',
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ARRAY(
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('X', 50, 70, 0.0005),
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('Y', -40, -30, 0.0005),
MDSYS.SDO_DIM_ELEMENT('Z', -10, 10, 0.0005)),
8192
COMMIT;
CREATE INDEX idx_test1
ON test1(ora_geometry)
INDEXTYPE IS MDSYS.SPATIAL_INDEX
I would appreciate any feedback on why this doesn't work and if there is a more elegant way of resolving the problem beside discarding my elevation values.

Answer 1

This is reproducable in 9.2.0.4. I couldn't find a bug entered for it.
I entered bug 3149274.
There is a similar bug (2409529) that breaks projected layers.