Thanks. That will work as a workaround and possibly a final solution. One issue I would have is that the account used to create reports can't create tables. I can get round it but it lacks some of the flexibility with lots of reports running at same time.

It's just interesting as to what is getting returned parsed by DBI or DBD::Oracle from the original. I can't use the SQL SELECT to create a table so it's not returning a "simple" value.