Dear Reader, now, I'm in a project which uses DBI (V1.3) and DBD::Informix (v0.6) and we have a serious problem:
The customers db tables have an awfull design. Sometimes the tabels contain hundrets of columns!!! At beginning writing a convinience modul for db access, we got following informix error message DBD::Informix::db prepare failed: SQL: -479: The number of DESCRIBED columns is greater than the allocated space. Our results in finding the reason of this error message was the assumption that esql/c of Informix cannot allocate space for more than 128 columns. Therefore we changed dbaccess within this module. If the number of columns exceed this value, selecting (or inserting) rows will be splitted in partial read or write operations. We wrote a program, which implements dumping a db table into a file. It seemes, that it works fine. But the error message obove appeared again. I reduced the number of columns per partial fetch to 16 but the error still occures. The question now is: What goes wrong in DBD::Informix???? bye mike
