Thanks for all the replies. Really appreciated.

The select statement was being used to find out whether a particular record existed in a database table. Should the record exist, the boolean variable was being set to true until now (Oracle 8i and previous releases). It is not the way I would do it either (just maintaining existing code), but still I wanted to know what changed in Oracle 9i to invalidate the statement, for the obvious reason that the package will have to be modified in order to be able to compile it.

Cheers,
Javi