"Expiration appears in cookie fine but not in database record. " The expiration of a cookie and a session are not the same and can differ. A cookie expires after a certain date. A session expires a certain number of secons after the last access of that session.

A blob is a field of undetermined length, they can hold text or binary data. they tend to be treated differently than a text field, and yes its size just floats. in displaying data to you your mysql access program may truncate the data as not to overwhelm your display. As stevieb says using native sql calls like select will probably show you more of the data in a_session

The data in a_session looks kinda like what Dumper produces, it may hold all the data in a format that perl can just eval to get the hash back.

if you use Dumper on what you get back from a $session = new CGI::Session(...); call it will look something like

$VAR1 = bless( {
                 '_CLAIMED_ID' => 'e161892f19c7adb6bcb1e89c26398c0b',
                 '_DATA' => {
                              '_SESSION_ATIME' => 1489198054,
                              '_SESSION_CTIME' => 1489198054,
                              '_SESSION_ETIME' => 604800,
                              '_SESSION_ID' => '223de9081eab77743d4a4a
+0cdc0a10f3',
                              '_SESSION_REMOTE_ADDR' => '192.168.231.2
+11',
                              'attempts' => 0,
                              'forename' => 'forename',
                              'isloggedin' => 1,
                              'lastname' => 'lastname',
                              'timein' => 1489198054,
                              'timeout' => 0,
                              'user_id' => 'uid',
                              'username' => 'username'
                            },
                 '_DRIVER_ARGS' => {
                                     'DataColName' => 'a_session',
                                     'Directory' => '/tmp',
                                     'IdColName' => 'id',
                                     'TableName' => 'sessions'
                                   },
                 '_DSN' => {
                             'driver' => 'file',
                             'id' => 'md5',
                             'serializer' => 'default'
                           },
                 '_OBJECTS' => {
                                 'driver' => bless( {
                                                      'DataColName' =>
+ 'a_session',
                                                      'Directory' => '
+/tmp',
                                                      'IdColName' => '
+id',
                                                      'NoFlock' => 0,
                                                      'TableName' => '
+sessions',
                                                      'UMask' => 432
                                                    }, 'CGI::Session::
+Driver::file' ),
                                 'id' => 'CGI::Session::ID::md5',
                                 'serializer' => 'CGI::Session::Serial
+ize::default'
                               },
                 '_QUERY' => undef,
                 '_STATUS' => 23
               }, 'CGI::Session' );
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Hi: My ignorance exposed I did not see the options on the SQL panel in MyPHP Admin

$D = {'_SESSION_ID' => '7032f2c7f5a2c721a483dc75fc29595e','isloggedin' => 1,'_SESSION_ETIME' => 604800,'#<expires>#' => 0,'forename' => 'Frankly','lastname' => 'HideIt','attempts' => 0,'_SESSION_REMOTE_ADDR' => '72.168.128.201','username' => 'username','_SESSION_CTIME' => 1489152441,'_SESSION_ATIME' => 1489174279,'sessiondata2' => 'b90af5330dc2c92ec389207ee3e67374','timeout' => 1489173579,'timein' => 1489174279,'user_id' => '89','logattempttimein' => 1489152454};;$D

Thanks for the edification. Happy Camper

What does the data look like from a native SELECT statement on the DB directly? More importantly, can you please show the code you're using to extract the data from the DB?

To further, what is "Sessions", and what generates its records? Is it being put in place by another Perl application? If so, which one?

Hi: Select result using lates SID logged on: a_session $D = {'_SESSION_ID' => '1603e837e501ebaaef7ce4635e... Select result using last logged out user: a_session $D = {'_SESSION_ID' => '7032f2c7f5a2c721a483dc75fc...

The data in both a_session records is partof the SID. A normal select statement. Don't understand this question.

use strict;
use diagnostics -verbose;
use warnings;
use CGI;
#use Carp::Always;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);
use CGI qw(:standard escapeHTML);
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use Data::Dumper;

use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);
use DB_File;    # persistent hash database
use CGI::Session;
use CGI::Cookie;
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the SELECT he mentioned is a native SQL command like

SELECT a_session FROM sessions WHERE id='7032f2c7f5a2c721a483dc75fc295
+95e';
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If you did that it may show you something like this.

$D = {'forename' => 'forename','timein' => 1489204868,'_SESSION_ID' =>
+ 'eb62615586d9b8a0f14f0dd3d820bf70','username' => 'username','_SESSIO
+N_ETIME' => 604800,'_SESSION_CTIME' => 1489204868,'_SESSION_REMOTE_AD
+DR' => '192.168.231.211','lastname' => 'lastname','user_id' => 'uid',
+'isloggedin' => 1,'_SESSION_ATIME' => 1489204868,'timeout' => 0,'atte
+mpts' => 0};;$D
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I am useing the native file support in CGI:Session, it stores each session record in its own file named cgisess_SID where SID is the contents of the _SESSION_ID key. as i suspected the data is a Dumper like structure of the _DATA keys value.