Matthew T. Kromer writes:
Here's the action from the Oracle error message guide:
Action: Enter a valid column name. A valid column name must begin with a letter, be less than or equal to 30 characters, and consist of only alphanumeric characters and the special characters $, _, and #. If it contains other characters, it must be enclosed in double quotation marks. It may not be a reserved word.
I read that as being that you can't use TO_CHAR() as a column name in your where clause; the TO_CHAR must be on the right-hand-side of the expression e.g.
where DATE_NAI_IND = TO_DATE('08/08/1997', 'dd/mm/yyyy')
although normally Oracle will do string to date conversion for you automatically. I do not think, this is the problem::
in order to implement case insensitive search, I used: where ... lower(column_name) like/= lower(literal) ... and Oracle did not complain. I expect, the left side of "=/like" is not restricted to a column name. Dieter