Oracle ORA-03117: two-task save area overflow

Feel free to skip to the bottom and read the "Update"...

Recently, I made some changes in Development to an Oracle Package. The package compiled cleanly and all the unit tests passed successfully.

However upon testing in one of our client applications, we started getting an "ORA-03117: two-task save area overflow" error. It is similar to an ORA-00600 error, useless to us, and usually results in Oracle saying "upgrade to x" [Oracle 10g, in this case].

What is particularly distressing about this particular case is that the Powerbuilder code errors at the package level. The changes were not even being referenced directly by PowerBuilder application.

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Update I've discovered that I could recreate this error solely within SQL-Plus by "desc <complex packagename>". If the "complex" package has a reasonable number of nested records/types, you can get this error.

DESC DBMS_METADATA;

We were using either Oracle 8 or Oracle 9 SQL-Net clients for the communication layer. If you are using the 10.2.x SQL-Net client, you don't encounter an error. Upgrading to a newer version of SQL-Net fixes this problem. It is NOT an application code issue.