Any Perl DBI experts?

[David Hummel]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Matt Shields <matt-urrlRJtNKRMsHrnhXWJB8w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I'm using DBI to query a MySQL database and I've used the following in
> numerous scripts I've written.  In every previous case I knew there was data
> in the resultset, but this time there may or may not be data.  If there
> isn't data, I get an error with the bind_columns statement.  How can I test
> to see there are results before doing the bind_columns and while?
>
> $sql = "SELECT id, name FROM table";
> $query = $dbh->prepare(qq{ $sql }) or die "Can't prepare SQL statement:
> $dbh::errstr\n";
> $query->execute or die "Can't execute SQL statement: $dbh::errstr\n";
>
> $query->bind_columns(\$id,\$name);
>
> while ($query->fetch) {
>  print "$id - $name\n";
> }

This shouldn't be causing an error.  bind_columns (and bind_col)
doesn't care if data is returned by the SELECT, although in rare cases
there can be issues with data types.

Please provide the error output via:

$query->bind_columns(\$id,\$name) or die "Can't bind columns: $dbh::errstr\n";

What are the data types for the "id" and "name" columns?  What
versions of Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, and MySQL are you using?