Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

Hello. I've been going at this for pretty much the day today and I keep running into the same wall. I am hitting an Oracle table that stores all the date fields as varchar2 in this format...15-JAN-2004.

I am kinda messing around wiht doing date range searches on the table and I've been working my way through it but I think I keep puking on trying to input the month as JAN, FEB, etc. I a trying a PreparedStatement in the follwoing way to handle my input parameter (hard coded here as an input string "05-AUG-2002")...and to_date within the SQL statement to hopefully read the DATE_CREATED record field as a date (again, this field is varchar2 stored as "15-JAN-2004", etc). I now keep getting an unparseable exception on "05-AUG-2002" when I try to parse it...

String SQFinal = "SELECT DATE_CREATED "
+ "FROM INVOICES "
+ "WHERE "
+ "DB_SOURCE = 'AX' "
+ "AND STATUS = 'PENDING' "
+ "AND to_date(DATE_CREATED,'dd-mmm-yyyy') < ? "
+ "ORDER BY CONTROL_NO DESC";

...jdbc statements here...

stmt=conn.createStatement();

String strNow = "05-AUG-2002";
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-mmm-yyyy");

java.util.Date dtNow = sdf.parse(strNow);

java.sql.Date dtNowSQL = new java.sql.Date(dtNow.getTime());

PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement(SQFinal);

ps.setDate(1,dtNowSQL);

rs=ps.executeQuery();

Thanks to combing through old posts in this forum and elsewhere, I've been able to get this to compile. I was having problems with the java.util.Date and java.sql.Date messing wiht each other...but I can't find anything on this weried date format I want to query.

Thank you very much for reading...any input at this point would be really appreciated.