Very Computer

Just wanted to share the following, it applies to 6.5 sp3:

After loading a set of SP-scripts with ISQL.EXE it turned out that for
several procedures the text (in syscomments table) was corrupt. What these
procedures had in common were large descriptive comment headers. Corruption
only occurred for comments in specific size ranges, e.g. 438 to 500 chars,
94? to 1006 chars, 1966 to 2012 chars.
Strangely, the corruption was not present if the same script was executed
using ISQL/W.

Eventually I was able to have ISQL load the procs without corruption to
syscomments by explicitly  setting the packet size to 8192 (switch '/a8192'
-- even though BOL says that *is* supposed to be the default packet size
under NT). Setting the packet size to 512 ( /a512 ) makes the problem
resurface, so maybe that is the actual default size.

Is somebody able to shed some light on what may be going on behind the
scenes here?

Incidentally, there is a KB article that describes similar corruption
problems for version 6.0, but does not give a workaround. . I'm surprised
this hasn't been fixed for 6.5.

Erik Oxaal
Conceptos a.s

Of course, the workaround in the KB is to make several short comments.

However, if I remember correctly, the workaround we used was to have the
comment after the as rather than embedded between the create statement and
the as.  E.g.

create procedure myproc (

as
code

This caused us a problem.

create procedure myproc (

as
/* Really big comment */
code

This did not.  Does this sound like your problem? - Russell Fields

Actually in my case the comment was *before* the create statement, I didn't
try moving it after the 'as' --- although I seem to recall reading
somewhere a recommendation to do so.

However, as long as it works fine by upping the packet size that's OK. I
was just wondering what was really going on behind the scenes to cause the
error.

Erik Oxaal
Conceptos a.s