Warning about retrieving lobs via ora_lob_read with zero length lobs

Hi,

This is just to warn you about a problem I recently hit with
DBD::Oracle. I originally reported it at
http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55028 as "DBD
INVALID_HANDLE" and since following the advice to use empty_clob I get a
segfault.

My problem was I had a procedure which can return an clob but sometimes
the clob needs to be empty. Initially, I just set it to '' but with
DBD::Oracle 1.24a I get an invalid handle error when I do that.
Following the suggestion to set it to empty_clob seemed to be the answer
but I then ran into a segfault in the following code:

# $ll is the lob locator returned by DBD::Oracle
my $len = $dbh->ora_lob_length($ll);
$lob = $dbh->ora_lob_read($ll, 1, $len);

It appears attempting to retrieve an empty clob when the $len above is 0
results in the segfault. It was an easy workaround in my code to check
the length first but I thought it was worth a mention. I updated the rt
but it is currently closed.

Martin
-- 
Martin J. Evans
Easysoft Limited
http://www.easysoft.com