Unfortunately I have to come to the conclusion that the latest ODBC
driver (8.0.0.2) is not as stable as first thought. When I initially
tested it I was using a single application with a few connections and it
seemed OK (better than 8.0.0.1 anyway)
Recently I have been doing heavier load testing within my ASP.NET
application. Being a Web app on Windows it is inheriently multi-threaded
and uses the MS .NET connect-execute-fetch-disconnect cycle heavily.
After obtaining just 10 connections and executing SQL the app starts to
report random database failure messages "No error" and null reference
exceptions withing Syetem.Data are common.
Various restarts, checking there are no other psqlodbc dlls and various
test loads end up with the same situation fairly quickly.
Switching back to the 7.3.2.0 ODBC driver and the app will run stable
for hours (or for as long as the test runs) with no driver errors.
I can now reproduce this problem in a single Windows GUI app by getting
lots of connections and radpidly executing SQL immediately after opening
each of the connections.
Sadly being in the .NET environment I can't see how to debug the driver
in these situations or how to get more information about the faults. It
still looks like buffer overruns causing the main problems.
I'm a bit concerned that Postgres is going to end up with a fantastic
server (even on Windows!), but badly let down by the ODBC driver, which
I suspect that a lot of the Windows newcomers will want to use. I know
that 7.3.2.0 is stable at the moment, but what is the way forward?
Regards,
Gary.
