That is a tough one. Never played whit ARSPerl before so I an not sure what it does. Any here is my best shot at it 1) PERL_BADFREE is there to cover some bugs with older OCIs so that covers 1 & 2 not sure exactly what it does as it was in there before I became the maintainer of DBD:Oracle 2) If Commenting it out works that I would do that as this like I said was a kludge for earler OCI APIs bugs, as you are using the latest OCI I should work for you. PERL_BADFREE has been in the code since 1.06 (2000) and likly before that so I do not think it will be an issue for you on more advanced platfores like 9i etc. By the way you would be much better off posting your question to dbi-users@perl.org (you don't need to subscribe in order to post, and you won't be automatically subscribed either as very few people use this form for dbi or driver support. dbi-users is where you'll get the best support