ORA-01036: illegal variable name/number

Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Question: We have many oracle8i databases running on Sun Solaris servers here. Recently, one of my colleagues transferred all of these databases to a SUN 6800 server (64-bit). Now he has left the company and I am handling these databases.

The oracle software installed on this server is of 64-bit version. I am not sure if the databases were earlier running on 32-bit or 64-bit version software

Now, the full database export for each of the databases is working absolutely fine, except one. The error I was getting in it while doing full export was :

EXP-00008
ORA-01036:illegal variable name/number

So what I did was, I shutdown the database, opened it in restricted mode, ran the catalog.sql and catproc.sql scripts as user internal.

Answer: The oerr utility shows this for the ORA-01036 error:

ORA-01036: illegal variable name/number

Cause: Unable to find bind context on user side

Action: Make sure that the variable being bound is in the SQL statement.

Answer by Edward Stoever:

Well, here is my guess... on the EXP: ORA-01036:illegal variable name/number error: if you are in archivelog mode (find out with: select log_mode from v$database; ), make sure that this query returns a value of TRUE:

SELECT value FROM v$parameter WHERE name = 'log_archive_start';
VALUE
--------------------------------------------------------------
TRUE
1 row selected

What can happen is you create a new database with the purpose of importing from some source, and the import just hangs and hangs. That is because the logs fill up and cannot switch until archiving takes place.

This is a common human error which may explain what is happening to you.

Here is another guess..... if the export is done from a database on a different version from the import, there are rules for what exp and imp executables must be used.

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