[ic] Sudden loss of products.comment in otherwise perfect catalog

Ed LaFrance interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Tue Apr 30 23:23:01 2002


At 06:24 PM 4/30/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>(dedicated RH 7.2, IC 4.8.3, RPC mode, Pgsql database)
>
>The "comment" field (AKA "long description") of ~75% of a client's 
>products went blank (NULL) recently.  TGIF (Thank Goodness I Found a 
>backup).  I don't yet have enough data to be useful to anyone (I can't 
>even reproduce the problem yet), but I thought there was a chance someone 
>had already seen this one or had some ideas.
>
>The only connecting factor between the ones that disappeared is that they 
>were quite large and full of HTML tags.  (The 25% that remain have simple 
>one-line entries in the comment field).
>
>  * We don't know the specific time it happened
>  * Current Intel says no one was using the admin
>  * error.log, /var/log/messages, and logs/* didn't reveal anything
>  * I'm thinking about turning on query logging, but I'll probably wait 
> until I can reproduce it.
>
>At any rate, just posting as a shot in the dark.  :-)

First thoughts:
- field size in Pgsql has been truncated for the comments field somehow;
- somebody tried to fiddle with the source text file in windows, it 
contained embedded carriage returns in the comments field, not a problem in 
Unix but a *big* problem for Microsoft products... net result: comments 
seriously chopped;

I would check the dates on products.txt, products.sql and the Pgsql logs 
(if you have them, sounds like you may not) for any evidence which roughly 
corresponds timewise with when the problem was first noticed.

- Ed L.



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