Reports no longer working after upgrade from 11.0.9 to 11.1.3

[Penny]

We recently upgraded our testing environment from 11.0.9 to 11.1.3 using an over the top install.  The upgrade went smoothly and we are testing.  We have so far a handful of reports that are no longer working in 11.1.9.  We are using DQM and our data source is an Oracle database.  The reports are relational.

They are all returning a 'Found an internal error:
java.lang.NullPointerException' at runtime.  The reports do not validate successfully in this version.   I have found two issues so far but it is slow going.

1) calling an oracle function with {sysdate} needed a cast({sysdate},date) - this one makes sense
2) we have a query item in the model that uses an oracle nvl function - when using this query item from the package in a report, it doesn't work, but if I create a calculated column in the report with the same nvl in it, success - this one doesn't make sense

Has anyone else upgrade to 11.1.3 and if so are they using relational reporting and are they experiencing any difficulty with reports?  I am looking for any help that would point me in the right directly in finding the problems.

Thank-you

[rockytopmark]

have you tried changing away from nvl() and using coalesce() instead, which is a native Cognos function?

[Penny]

That is exactly what I will do.  Interesting that the package that was upgraded does NOT run correctly, but the same function added to a report in 11.1.3 does.  I am going to try to republish the package and see if it works, but either way coalesce is the function I should be using.  Thank-you