SQL*Loader fails on EBCDIC infile - please help!!

Question

See excerpt from control file below.
I cannot get this control file to load correctly in 9i. This worked for years on our 7.3.4 system and still does with the same infile. The only difference is that I added the "FIX 101" that tells SQL*Loader the length of the records after talking with Oracle Support. That was not necessary in 7.3.4.
In 9i and I continually get ORA-08143 invalid month when the data in position 19 through 23 contains the value '20000000'. As you can see, I want a null value substituted for dates of '0' and '20000000'. I tested loading an ASCII file instead with a data value on '20000000' and that worked fine. Therefore, I think it has something to do with the infile being EBCDIC and/or the CHARACTERSET specification. It's as if it is ignoring the decode statement. Any ideas??
LOAD DATA CHARACTERSET WE8EBCDIC500
INFILE 'pulldoca.fil' "FIX 101"
INTO TABLE HL.DOCA
TRUNCATE
status_date POSITION(19:23) DECIMAL(9,0)
"to_date(decode(:status_date,0,null,20000000,null,
to_char(:status_date,'09999999')),'yyyymmdd')"
)

Answer 1

Hi,
I do not think there is anything wrong with your DECODE statement. However, I think that the value of status_date in the record identified in your log file does not have a valid month. For example if you had a status_date value of 20010001 with mask yyyymmdd then it would have an invalid month. 00 was not a valid month in your 20000000 status_date value so too is it in 20010001.
Something totally different to your reported problem is that v7.3.4 would allow a field containing spaces to be converted to a number data type. Also v7.3.4 would allow precision of declared date variables (eg: start_date date(20);). None of that is available from Oracle v8 onwards.
Cheers,
Tony