Hi,

I think, you are right. Because, in following case, I am running the 1st select statement without parallel in it and it still failing with invalid number error. but in second, it is not failing when using decode statement.

select attribute3,to_number(attribute3) from hxc_time_attributes

select attribute3,to_number(decode(attribute3,'NA',NULL,attribute3)) from hxc_time_attributes

Thanks,