Sometimes you get an error in a query with placeholders, but the same query with values pasted in the placeholders works. In this case you might need to use bind_params with the third parameter - type. Like this:  $sth->bind_param(1, $value, 4) for integer values on my DBI.

I encountered this problem on a DB2 database accessed via ODBC, it seems that DBI quoted integer parameters and the database did not like it.