FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Charles Bearden [mailto:Charles.F.Bearden AT uth.tmc.edu]
> Sent: April 28, 2004 12:41 PM
> 
> When I try to
> load a chunk of Unicode into an ntext field in some records, 
> the program
> raises an exception due to a "function sequence error".
> 
> I have built and installed the following:
> 
>   mxBase-2.0.5
>   mxCommercial-2.0.6
>   libiodbc-3.51.2
>   freetds-0.62.3

Hi Charles, 

I'm unfamiliar with mxBase and know Python only from a distance.  I offer 
mere speculation.  

The "function sequence error" might refer to an ODBC error meaning "you 
called funtion B without calling function A first".  We have, in the past, 
found some cases in the FreeTDS ODBC driver whereby it expects an A-B-C 
calling sequence, but the ODBC spec says B is optional.  

Unfortunately, there's no neat trail of the calling sequence in the log.  If 
particular records cause the application to call FreeTDS differently for some 
reason, that might not be clear from the log.  

The error message emission logic should write a message to the TDSDUMP log in 
addition to returning an error to the caller.  If an error came back from the 
server (unlikely, based on your description) it would definitely be logged.  
I'd look for something along those lines.  Since your log is probably huge, 
perhaps you post a relevant chunk or put it on a website somewhere?   

> The error is specific to particular records.  In one file, it is the
> 11th record; in another, the 142nd (which also means that 141 records
> are successfully loaded before the error occurs).  

By "specific", do you mean specific to the data, or specific to the order?  
IOW, if you move the 11th record to be first, does it still break?  (I bet: 
Yes.)  Is that record especially large or somehow different from the others?  
Perhaps its an encoding issue.  Maybe there's a unicode value unsuitable to 
your client character set.  Or maybe this advice is worth what you're paying 
for it....

If nothing else, post the last 500 lines or so of the log, and we'll see what 
we see.  

HTH.

--jkl

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