Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!percy!parsely!bucket!whizz!bbh
From: bbh@whizz.uucp (Bud Hovell)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: isql command breaks (Informix SQL)
Keywords: erratic - sometimes works fine
Message-ID: <955@whizz.uucp>
Date: 28 Nov 89 17:19:58 GMT
Reply-To: bbh@whizz (Bud Hovell)
Organization: McCormick & Hovell, Inc.
Lines: 40

We have a problem here that is driving me nuts! :-<

It seems that when we invoke isql (by the user at the command line or in a
shell script), it sometimes works fine, and sometime just bombs out with a
message of "Unknown error".

This happens just at the point after the Informix notice appears and when
the menu would be expected to appear.  Seems to relate to the isql invocation
itself, and not to choice of options, dbname, etc. Dosn't matter which
options or database we use.

When this happens at night during one of the many scripted updates we run
under cron, it dumps ~2 Meg of junk into my cronlog, and hogs resources
until I manually kill the process.

There seems to be no particular pattern to the erratic bahavior. I have
re-installed both the kernal and the SQL software, and neither seems to
have make any change.

In the margin of my manual is a note from a conversation I had long
ago with tech support. The tech made the comment that this feature is
"awkward to use". Is "awkward" the approved newspeak euphomism for "fragile"
or "unreliable"? [I failed, at the time, to ask the nice person what he was
really trying to say.]

What is also peculiar is that we have NOT always had this problem - seems 
to be cropping up just in the past two months. It doesn't seem to have
anything to do with the size of the database. We *think* we have permissions
and ownerships right, and there are no other mystery problems with the db
software.

We are running version 2.10.00B of Informix SQL on a 3B1, unix 3.51a os.

Any help would be most gratefully appreciated. 'Getting to be deperation time
on this problem.
 
                                 Bud
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