Oracle is much more stringent with parameter bindings than other DBMS (e.g. MSSQL). For example, take the following statement "UPDATE MYTABLE SET FILENAME = :to WHERE FILENAME = :from". Pretty innocent, and the same query works on MSSQL. The problem is when you bind the parameters and execute the SQL using the OracleClient ADO.NET provider, you get an ORA-01745 error. I didn't see anything in google on this, but I figured that reserved words were at the root of the problem. So I changed the parameter names to ":toname" and ":fromname" and everything works just fine.