We have an Oracle 10.2.0.3 databases running on HPUX11.11 - 64bit. When connecting our application we intermittently get an ORA-03115 unsupported network datatype or representation error. At this point, the application is attempting to load and is running a simple select on a simple table having already queried 7 tables apparently sucessfully.

The databases in question are all newly upgraded to 10.2.0.3 from 8.1.7 and are in UAT at the moment.

We have several other installations elsewhere, although the Oracle version there is 10.2.0.1.0, and we have never experienced the problem.

This problem occurs every now and again and we can make the problem temporarily go away by "alter system flush shared_pool". I really dont understand what is going on.

I found reference to Oracle Bug 6085665 on the internet which says that this bug occurs in Oracle 10.2..0.3 patchset and appears to be a pretty good description of our problem, but I can only find 2 references to it via Google which is strange. Is anyone else using 10.2..0.3? Is anyone out there aware of this bug or indeed this problem?