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

I had this problem in one legacy application that create prepared statement dynamically.

String firstName;
StringBuilder query =new StringBuilder("select id, name from employee where country_Code=1");
query.append("and  name like '");
query.append(firstName + "' ");
query.append("and ssn=?");
PreparedStatement preparedStatement =new prepareStatement(query.toString());

when it try to set value for ssn, it was giving invalid column index error, and finally found out that it is caused by firstName having ' within; that disturb the syntax.