ORA-06580: PL/SQL: could not find program unit being called

Our IVR application started receiving an ORA-06580 error from a certain stored procedure after a separate but related package was pushed into production the day earlier. The package had compiled fine, was a valid package, and had all necessary execute privileges assigned to its users. The DBAs could not find any issues with the package or procedure whatsoever.

The procedure ran successfully without error for various users, yet the error only occurred for a single user – the data source user that we have specified in the app server (OAS). Assuming that there might be a stale or invalid JDBC connection or some issue with connection pooling, it was decided to restart the wireless containers on the application server. And sure enough, the error went away.

I’m still scratching my head on this one because in the 5 years that we’ve been running Oracle application server, this is the first time that the containers had to be bounced after a production database update. Not sure if this is a one-off event that will never come up again, or if we’re going to have to repeat the process for every production push from now on.

To summarize,

Problem: ORA-06580: PL/SQL: could not find program unit being called
Fix: Restart the OAS containers.