Re: Sharing database handles across forked child processes

On Nov 13, 2007, at 1:18 PM, dan(at)sidhe(dot)org wrote:

> Yep, this is a fork without exec. And the child processes often aren't
> even doing any database access -- the database connection's opened and
> held, then a child is forked off, and the child 'helpfully' closes the
> handle during the child's global destruction phase.

What's your programming language? If it is perl using the DBI, you
*must* close the handle on the child else perl's object destroy will
try to close the handle by doing a shutdown on the connection, which
will muck up your parent. The voodoo to make this happen is this:

$dbh->{InactiveDestroy} = 1;
$dbh = undef;

Also note that for some reason, this invalidates any prepared
statements in the parent DBI object, so you need to make sure you
don't have any, or just re-open the handle on the parent too.