Which is why DBI drivers should default the LongReadLen value to some reasonable amount (DBD::Sybase defaults it to 32K as that is the normal default for Sybase connections), and I see that the DBI manual actually states that the default should be 0, meaning "do not fetch BLOB columns" (and made me realize that DBD::Sybase does not behave correctly when LongReadLen is set to 0...)

Michael