I have a very high number of child cursors being generated (>3000) for a particular query.

Database version 19.15 on AIX

Why am I getting so many child cursors

the query is in a package which is being called from an application. it has 2 bind variables 1 of which will almost always be null and the other has 125 distinct values and yet I am getting 3000 cursor children. When I query v$sql_shared_cursors I can see that over 95% of the reasons are bind_equiv_mismatch. I don't understand how so many children can be generated. All the calls to the package are made from 8 distinct application servers (however the way it is set up means that an individual bind variable value will only be