Thursday, December 22, 2011

I found a new Derby bug!

It doesn't happen very often that I find a bug in Derby, so it's worth noting: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-5554.

I'm just enough disconnected from day-to-day Derby development at this point to not immediately understand what the bug is.

Note that the crash is in a generated method:


Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.derby.exe.acf81e0010x0134x6972x0511x0000033820000.g0(Unknown Source)

Derby uses generated methods in its query execution for tasks such as projection and restriction of queries.

So, for example, the generated method above is probably implementing part of the "where" clause of the query that causes the crash.

Derby generated methods are constructed at runtime, by dynamically emitting java bytecodes into a classfile format, and then dynamically loading that class into the Java runtime. It's quite clever, but quite tricky to diagnose, because it's hard to see the actual Java code that is being run.

A long time ago, I tracked down some debugging tips for working on crashes in generated code, and collected them here: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/DumpClassFile.

It's late, and I'm tired (and suffering from a head cold), but if I get some time over the holiday weekend I'll try to look into this crash some more.

Of course, perhaps somebody like Knut Anders or Rick will have already figured the problem out by then :)

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