ORA-03113 and Bulk Collect

It can be quite frustrating when you are working on a database package and your session is terminated time and time again and leaves you clueless as too why this is happening. First of all, this is reproducible on an Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition - haven't tried other versions (yet).

SQL> @../utils/rel

BANNER
----------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bi
PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
CORE    10.2.0.4.0      Production
TNS for 64-bit Windows: Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production

The following simple block of PL/SQL code will cause an ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel - as you can see from the copy-paste example below.

SQL> declare
  2     type rec is record
  3        (num number
  4        ,str varchar2(10)
  5        ,dte  date
  6        );
  7     rec_t rec;
  8  begin
  9     select rownum
 10          , 'testing'
 11          , sysdate
 12       bulk collect
 13       into rec_t
 14       from dual
 15     ;
 16  end;
 17  /
ERROR:
ORA-03114: not connected to ORACLE


declare
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
Process ID: 0
Session ID: 25 Serial number: 4602

On lines 2 through 6 a record type is declared, with three attributes. All the attributes have a different datatype, but that's just for show.
Line 7 defines a local variable of the just defined record type.
On line 9 through 15 I do a BULK COLLECT into the just declared local variable.

There is nothing special going on, but you're loosing your connection anyway... What is causing the problem? The block of code is doing a BULK COLLECT (many records possibly) into a Record type which can only hold a single record. Removing line 12 from the code resolves the ORA-03113.