Query Errors: ORA-01036: illegal variable name/number

Question

Hi All,
When I run a query against two tables within our data warehouse I am getting an IO Exception. Due to company restrictions I can't quickly increase my IO Limit So what I have done is written a query that cycles through all of the large tables partitions and extracts the data.
The problem I get is that when I run this query in Toad. It thinks my :MI, :SS are variables and wont run this. Does anyone know what I can do to resolve this issue?
create table completion_log
  action_complate_dt        date,
  table_name                   varchar2(1000),
  partition_number            varchar2(1000)
nologging
compress ;
create table  STORE_DATA_HERE
  field_1                varchar2(1000),
  field_2                date,
  field_3                varchar2(1000)
nologging
compress ;
commit;
begin
   for ptn in (select partition_name p from all_tab_partitions t where table_name='REALLY_LARGE_TABLE')
   loop
      execute immediate q'^
      insert /*+ APPEND */ into STORE_DATA_HERE
        SELECT  field_1,
                field_2,
                field_3      
          FROM  REALLY_LARGE_TABLE partition (^'||ptn.p||q'^)
         WHERE  field_3 IN (  'XXXX',  'YYYY')
                AND data_date BETWEEN TO_DATE('07/12/2011 00:00:00', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
                        AND TO_DATE('08/12/2011 23:59:59', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24:MI:SS')
      ^';
     insert into completion_log values (sysdate,'STORE_DATA_HERE',ptn.p);
     commit;
   end loop;
end;

Answer 1

In your case it is quite easy...
just remove the collons from the format and the literal...and off you go
begin
   for ptn in (select partition_name p from all_tab_partitions t where table_name='REALLY_LARGE_TABLE')
   loop
      execute immediate q'^
      insert /*+ APPEND */ into STORE_DATA_HERE
        SELECT  field_1,
                field_2,
                field_3      
          FROM  REALLY_LARGE_TABLE partition (^'||ptn.p||q'^)
         WHERE  field_3 IN (  'XXXX',  'YYYY')
                AND data_date BETWEEN TO_DATE('07/12/2011 000000', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24MISS')
                        AND TO_DATE('08/12/2011 235959', 'DD/MM/YYYY HH24MISS')
      ^';
     insert into completion_log values (sysdate,'STORE_DATA_HERE',ptn.p);
     commit;
   end loop;
end;