Funny Oracle Error....

I always have a habit of looking up for the errors returned by Oracle in the server itself using the 'oerr' utility before googling it out since 'oerr' gives you a suggestion of a quick fix saving you quite some time that is spent on rooting through the innumerable hits from Google for a workaround or a fix.

I stumbled upon an error when trying to pull the DDL of a materialized view using the dbms_metadata.get_ddl function, upon trying to find the cause/action of each of the errors in the returned error stack I was told to "Please contact someone who can fix the problem.", but who would that SOMEONE be....Hey Larry !!! Mr. Ellison, are you listening ;-)

SQL> select dbms_metadata.get_ddl('MATERIALIZED_VIEW','JUNK_MVIEW','BOGUS_SCHEMA') from dual;
ERROR:
ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error
ORA-31605: the following was returned from LpxXSLResetAllVars in routine
kuxslResetParams:
LPX-1: NULL pointer
ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_XML", line 246
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_METADATA_INT", line 7511
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_METADATA_INT", line 9453
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_METADATA", line 1919
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_METADATA", line 2792
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_METADATA", line 4333
ORA-06512: at line 1

SQL> ! oerr ora 6502
06502, 00000, "PL/SQL: numeric or value error%s"
// *Cause:
// *Action:

SQL> ! oerr ora 31605
31605, 00000, "the following was returned from %s in routine %s:\nLPX-%d: %s"
// *Cause:  An LPX routine (XML/XSL processing) returned an internal
//          error number to its PL/SQL wrapper routine in facility KUX which
//          provides the implementation for package UTL_XML.
// *Action: Look up the LPX error number and follow its corrective action.

SQL> ! oerr lpx 1
00001, 00000, "NULL pointer"
// *Cause:  A NULL pointer was detected as an internal error condition.
// *Action: This is a programming error by the caller of the XML parser.
//          Please contact someone who can fix the problem.