One Cause of ORA-00600 with qctstc2o1

Today one of my queries failed on Oracle because the query had too many columns.  The query is very simple, but returns 1023 columns of output.  The query is simply

SELECT * FROM TABLE1

INNER JOIN TABLE2 ON TABLE1.COL1 = TABLE2.COL1

INNER JOIN TABLE3 ON TABLE1.COL1 = TABLE3.COL1

INNER JOIN TABLE4 ON TABLE1.COL1 = TABLE4.COL1

If I remove any of the joins from the query it will succeed.  If I return fewer than 1000 columns it will succeed.  But if I run it as is I get this error:

Error report:

SQL Error: ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [qctstc2o1], [1], [0], [0], [1], [0], [0], []

00600. 00000 –  “internal error code, arguments: [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s], [%s]”

*Cause:    This is the generic internal error number for Oracle program exceptions. This indicates that a process has encountered an exceptional condition.

*Action:   Report as a bug – the first argument is the internal error number