It's probably a quoting issue. Unless you provide the SQL, there's no specific help to be given. One thought though - if you send Oracle an empty string through a DBI placeholder it is evaluated as a NULL. For example: select count(*) from my_table where some_column = ? and the paramater to the execute is the empty string, $sth->execute(''), it is actually executed as select count(*) from my_table where some_column = NULL which will always return 0, since NULL != NULL (or more generally NULL != anything).

To summarise: it's probably a quoting issue. Try it without placeholders. Have a look in v$sql. Set client_trace_level = admin in your local sqlnet.ora. Turn on DBI tracing. There's loads you can do to isolate the problem

rdfield