title: ORA-01843: not a valid month in Java application
body: <p>We have a Java Web application deployed in SAP Netweaver that accesses an Oracle 10g Database through plain JDBC. The application was working fine until a few days ago, when a query was causing the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ORA-01843: not a valid month
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The query that's giving us trouble is this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT *
  FROM   (SELECT *
          FROM   (SELECT inspeccion.sociedad_id,
                         inspeccion_id,
                         estado_id,
                         (SELECT des_estado
                          FROM   estado
                          WHERE  estado.estado_id = inspeccion.estado_id)
                         des_estado,
                         (SELECT numero_secuencia
                          FROM   estado
                          WHERE  estado.estado_id = inspeccion.estado_id)
                         numero_secuencia,
                         planta_id,
                         (SELECT des_planta
                          FROM   planta
                          WHERE  planta.planta_id = inspeccion.planta_id)
                         des_planta,
                         area_id,
                         (SELECT des_area
                          FROM   area
                          WHERE  area.area_id = inspeccion.area_id)       des_area
                         ,
                         igp_id,
                         '-'
                         nom_lider,
                         nom_inspector,
                         nom_responsable,
                         To_char(fecha_inspeccion, 'DD/MM/YYYY')
                         fecha_inspeccion,
                         observacion,
                         recomendacion
                  FROM   inspeccion) inspeccion) t_inspeccion
  WHERE  estado_id NOT IN ( 10 )
         AND t_inspeccion.estado_id IN ( 11, 12 )
         AND t_inspeccion.planta_id = 42
         AND t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion &gt;= To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy')
         AND t_inspeccion.sociedad_id = '0101'
  ORDER  BY t_inspeccion.numero_secuencia,
            t_inspeccion.fecha_inspeccion
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>We were suspecting of the <code>To_date('01/11/2010', 'dd/mm/yyyy')</code> statement, but when we run the query trough DBVisualizer we have no trouble at all.</p>
  
  <p>I'm kind of lost here. Maybe there's a DB Setting that's messing with the query, or some SAP Netweaver configuration? Or perhaps some Oracle Driver issue?</p>