[Note: this is an old blog entry which I used to have as a Slashdot journal entry. I thought I had lost it, but thanks to the Wayback machine, you can now see what I was blogging about all those many years ago.]
Entry date: Monday October 15 @06:05AM [2001]
Kak! I’m experiencing major problemos with the ‘section checking’ code for the production side of the Cradley Group Intranet. It seems as though I’m either hitting a problem with the Activestate Perl executable (v5.6.1 build 629, Aug 20 2001) or with DBI (1.14) or DBD::ODBC (0.28).
Basically, when I certain parts of the code run, Perl.exe throws up a Dr.Watson error on my Win2k Professional work’s laptop, and only half of the page displays on the browser. The problem is is that the script doesn’t send anything to the browser until it’s practically finished – therefore it would seem that the ‘output to browser’ code is buggy. Problem is, is that the same code is being used on Beebware.com, Adlive.co.uk, PDFCheck.com and the intranet site all without problems. Adlive/PDFCheck/Intranet are running on Win2k Advanced Server with Apache, Beebware.com is on a –nix box with Apache and my laptop (beebware.demon.co.uk if I’m online and disabled my personal firewall) is Win2k Professional with Apache. Therefore I don’t think it’s a ‘sending output’ problem.
I’m going to pull all the code that it could be running apart in the hope of narrowing the bug down – it’s going to be a lot of fun (coffee pot standing by – I think I’m going to need it)….
[Added]
Looks like it’s a reported bug with DBD::ODBC when you’ve executed a number of SQL statements. Activestate’s bug database has it as 15682: DBD::ODBC crashing perl on exit, 17417: Perl triggers Dr.Watson on exit with access violation msg, 16568: Access Violation using DBD::ODBC, 16493: Scripts using DBD Mysql or DBD ODBC crashing, 17439: DBD::ODBC crashes on exit and I’m sure theres another couple of reports in their database.
I’ve now had to add ‘cache-facilities’ to some of my ‘SQL-blocks’ to try and avoid the problem.
Ho hum – such is life.