What does the following Oracle error mean: invalid column index

Question

I got the following error while testing some code:

SQLException: Invalid column index

What exactly does that mean?

Is

Answer 1

If that's a SQLException thrown by Java, it's most likely because you are trying to get or set a value from a ResultSet, but the index you are using isn't within the range.

For example, you might be trying to get the column at index 3 from the result set, but you only have two columns being returned from the SQL query.