I am working on a program to automate parsing data from XML files and storing it into several databases. (Specifically the USGS realtime water quality service, if anyone's interested, at http://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/WaterML-Interim-REST-Service.html) It's written in Python 2.5.1 using LXML and PYODBC. The databases are in Microsoft Access 2000.
The connection function is as follows:
def get_AccessConnection(db):
connString = 'DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=' + db
cnxn = pyodbc.connect(connString, autocommit=False)
cursor = cnxn.cursor()
return cnxn, cursor
where db is the filepath to the database.
The program:
a) opens the connection to the database
b) parses 2 to 8 XML files for that database and builds the values from them into a series of records to insert into the database (using a nested dictionary structure, not a user-defined type)
c) loops through the series of records, cursor.execute()-ing an SQL query for each one
d) commits and closes the database connection
If the cursor.execute() call throws an error, it writes the traceback and the query to the log file and moves on.
When my coworker runs it on his machine, for one particular database, specific records will simply not be there, with no errors recorded. When I run the exact same code on the exact same copy of the database over the exact same network path from my machine, all the data that should be there is there.
My coworker and I are both on Windows XP computers with Microsoft Access 2000 and the same versions of Python, lxml, and pyodbc installed. I have no idea how to check whether we have the same version of the Microsoft ODBC drivers. I haven't been able to find any difference between the records that are there and the records that aren't. I'm in the process of testing whether the same problem happens with the other databases, and whether it happens on a third coworker's computer as well.
What I'd really like to know is ANYTHING anyone can think of that would cause this, because it doesn't make sense to me. To summarize: Python code executing SQL queries will silently fail half of them on one computer and work perfectly on another.
Edit:
No more problem. I just had my coworker run it again, and the database was updated completely with no missing records. Still no idea why it failed in the first place, nor whether or not it will happen again, but "problem solved."