I am using DBI-1.37 and DBD::Oracle-1.06 successfully with the
application yasql-1.81 (an sqlplus replacement). But when I tried
installing DBD::Oracle-1.14, yasql appeared to work as normal but
developed a strange timeout problem. After working correctly for
about 20 seconds after login, it would print
Warning: Connection lost (timeout: 20)
and then exit. If no SQL commands had been sent to the database then
the message would be 'Alarm Clock' instead.
I mention these messages so that search engines will find them. A bit
of digging shows that the problem is caused by an alarm signal being
received even though alarm(0) has been called. In other words, code
like
alarm(20);
alarm(0);
print "waiting\n";
0 while 1;
will print 'waiting' and then get SIGALRM. I have reduced the bug to
a test case of two files. First a stripped-down DBI.pm:
package DBI;
use DynaLoader;
@ISA = qw(DynaLoader);
bootstrap DBI;
sub install_driver {
eval 'require DBD::Oracle;';
}
1;
Save this code as DBI.pm.min. Then create another file:
$SIG{ALRM} = sub { print "got alarm\n"; exit(0) };
alarm(1); print "set alarm\n";
package DBD::Oracle;
require 'DBI.pm.min';
@ISA = qw(DynaLoader);
bootstrap DBD::Oracle;
alarm(0); print "unset alarm\n";
0 while 1;
Save this and run it with perl. The expected output would be
set alarm
unset alarm
followed by an infinite loop which you can interrupt with C-c. But on
my system it prints
set alarm
unset alarm
got alarm
showing that alarm(0) did not stop alarms from happening.
As likely as not this is a problem with my particular system:
% uname -a
SunOS ftidev1.london.kbcfp.com 5.8 Generic_108528-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R
Solaris
but still I'd appreciate it if others could try this test case and see
what it does. It needs DBD::Oracle installed; the strange thing is
that it works correctly with DBD::Oracle-1.06 but not with 1.14. I
haven't yet narrowed down the versions further.
--
Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
