ORA-01722 Please help me understand this Oracle error

Hi to all,

this is the first time I post a message on this ng and I am not sure if this is the right Oracle ng to post my request of help. I apologize if this is not the correct place and please do not pay too much attention to my very bad way of writing in english: I hope you will be able to understand and I tank you very very much in advance for your support.

In the company I work in we have a US software that uses Oracle 8.1.7 to store data.
It is a client server application: a main server to wich we have connected 3 workstations.
The application uses both Oracle Client and Oracle ODBC driver to connect to the Oracle server.

When I launch the application from a workstation an error occurs, ORA-01722 invalid number (it happens I guess with a 'SELECT' operation). We have NT 4.0 SP 6 installed on the server and Win 98SE installed on the 3 clients.
Both the OS are in english, but they have been bought in Italy. The developers of the applications said that there could be a problem with the international settings: we tried to change the decimal separator as well as the dates format according to the US standards, but nothing new happened.

In the original Oracle documentation shipped with the database we found the following description of the problem:
ORA-01722 invalid number

Cause: The attempted conversion of a character string to a number failed because the character string was not a valid numeric literal. Only numeric fields or character fields containing numeric data may be used in arithmetic functions or expressions. Only numeric fields may be added to or subtracted from dates.

Action: Check the character strings in the function or expression. Check that they contain only numbers, a sign, a decimal point, and the character "E" or "e" and retry the operation.

For sure it is a problem of configuration of our machines since in US the people that sold to us the application have no this problem and also are not able to reproduce it on their machines....so we have to find out what is wrong on our workstations.

Please note that if I work with the same application on the server, using it locally, the error disappears....so, it is connected with the configuration of the client machines only.

Tank you very very much for your help.
Please do not esitate to contact me on the ng if you need any further detail to understand bettere the situation we have.

Bye

Luca Received on Sat Jul 14 2001 - 09:53:04 CDT