ORA-00907 when quering from my Java application but works fine in SQL Developer

Question

My query that I put into a prepared statement is:

select * 
  from ( select seq, audit_ts, message_type
           from log2 
          where 1 = 1 
            and message_type in ('SOURCE', 'DEST') 
          order by seq desc ) 
 where ROWNUM <= ?

When I run the query in my application, I get:

java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00907: missing right parenthesis

EDIT: Here is the java executing the query. I am trying to return a set of search results, so the prefix contains the SELECT statement and then I can have any number of suffixes (in this excerpt "AUDIT_LOG_SEARCH2") which are the parameterized WHERE clauses based on the user search:

StringBuffer query = new StringBuffer(300);
query.append(dbAdapter.getQuery("AUDIT_LOG_ENTRY_PREFIX"));
query.append(dbAdapter.getQuery("AUDIT_LOG_SEARCH2"));

// Insert parameters to complete the sql prepared statement 
PreparedStatement ps = _dbConn.prepareStatement(query.toString());
ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery();

But the query runs fine when I run it separately in SQL Developer. The query was originally created for Postgres, then updated for Oracle. Any tips?

Answer 1

Based on @AlexPoole and @EdGibbs comments, I decided to add a bunch more debug statements. It turns out the method was being recursively called with a different sql "suffix" later on in the program if certain conditions were met. The suffix was not updated with the necessary parenthesis for the new ROWNUM wrapping the statement. So although the ORA-00907 can be thrown for many different formatting problems, it was in fact a right parenthesis that was causing me problems :P

The prefix and suffix seems like a weird pattern in this code base for creating sql queries. I'm thinking of getting rid of this and refactoring so queries don't have to be built like that. Any advice??

So for anyone else who runs into this Oracle error, I would suggest logging the sql statement you are generating and play around with it in SQL Developer. If it works in there, but not in your application, your code is probably doing something funky :P

Answer 2

You need to set the variables into the preparedStatement before executing.

PreparedStatement ps = _dbConn.prepareStatement(query.toString());
ps.setInt(1, 10);

Please post what query.toString() gives you if that doesn't work. Not query, but query.toString()

What are you doing in your:

// Insert parameters to complete the sql prepared statement

Are you using correctly the methods ps.setString... or whatever? Or are you just replacing the question marks? the second might be corrupting your query.