Greetings Monks. Yet again I've been bitten by reference numification. Witness: 

        # commit in 1000-row chunks
        if ($row and ($row % $COMMIT_CHUNK_SIZE == 0)) {
            $dbh->commit;
        }

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That code is supposed to commit a transaction every $COMMIT_CHUNK_SIZE rows. It would work great if $row was the row count. Unfortunately for me, $row was actually an ARRAY ref, which meant that the commits never happened (or happened on every row, if the pointer in $row happened to be an even multiple of $COMMIT_CHUNK_SIZE). Even more unfortunately, this usually didn't matter because MySQL was able to handle quite a lot of inserts in a single transaction. That is, until it couldn't, and blew up with a buffer size error in the middle of an 8-hour job.

Here's what I would have liked to see when that code ran:

   Warning: numifcation of a reference at line 100.

Intentional numification of a reference is so rare, and unintential numification is so common that I think this makes a heck of a lot of sense as a warning. If my head of steam lasts long enough I may work up a patch.

And may I also say, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGRHHH.

Thank you.

-sam

In reply to The trap of reference numification by samtregar

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