Major Description
1) Direct SQL is broken on Oracle due to the usage of NUMBER type which is translated by DN into decimal rather than long. This appears to be specific to some cases because it seemed to have worked before (different version of Oracle? JDBC? DN? Maybe depends on whether db was auto-created).
2) When partition dropping code falls back to JDO, it creates objects to return, then drops partitions. It appears that dropping makes DN objects invalid. We create metastore partition objects out of DN objects before drop, however the list of partition column values is re-used, rather than copied, into these. DN appears to clear this list during drop, so the returned object becomes invalid and the exception is thrown.