thanks for the response.
I have "validates_uniqueness_of :phone_number" in the model, and it
worked fine until the DBA got involved.
Now for this error, Oracle just causes the rake task to abort rather
than returning an error.
The data is fine, and I am not trying to break any foreign key
constraints.
I am getting an error on an insert, all I need to know is how to
capture the error before Oracle aborts the rake task.
Can I request you to respectfully to bow out of this conversion, so
that someone else may try to help?