ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [00000000] [SIGILL]

ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [00000000] [SIGILL]
ORA-7445 Followed By ORA-1000 "MAXIMUM OPEN CURSORS EXCEEDED" Error [ID 1138647.1]

Applies to:

Oracle Server - Enterprise Edition - Version: 9.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2 - Release: 9.2 to 11.2
Information in this document applies to any platform.

You are experiencing ORA-7445 core dump errors which are accompanied by ORA-1000 errors, e.g.:
ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [00000000] [SIGILL] [Illegal opcode] [0x000000000] [] []
ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1
ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded



You may have already noticed that OPEN_CURSORS was set to a low value and corrected it by setting it higher and still encounter the errors.

Cause

As the errors suggest, this is due to the session running out of open cursor slots.  This can often be traced back to a coding issue in the application where the code is opening many cursors and not explicitly closing them.

Solution

Research will be needed in the code that is being run to do determine what cursors need to be closed explicitly to avoid the ORA-1000 MAXIMUM OPEN CURSORS EXCEEDED
Reslove the ORA-1000 error by increasing the OPEN_CURSORS parameter value which will also stop the related ORA-7445 errors.