[DB-SIG] ATTENTION: memory corruption in Oracle 8.1.6 client library on Sun Sparc Solaris

[Dr. Dieter Maurer]

We used DCOracle (August 1999) compiled with -DORACLE8 to
connect to an Oracle 8.1.6 database on a Sun Sparc Solaris 2.7
machine ....

... and were plagued by a series of mysterious memory corruption
problems. The mean time between failures for our Zope system
was between 5 to 15 minutes.

An analysis with "purify" detected
2 writes after free in any call to OCILogoff.
Further analysis revealed that not only heap memory was corrupted
but data in the standard C library as well.


The problem disappeared after "DCOracle" was compiled without
"-DORACLE8".

The Oracle 8.1.6 (release 2.0.6.0.0) client library seems to contain
a severe memory corruption bug on Sun Sparc Solaris.


Dieter