Comments on: Debugging Live Queries

By: Cody Mays

Cody Mays — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:02:11 +0000

I would just use a custom error handler and log the error message and stack dump to a file/database. Emailing gets annoying. This article does get people thinking though. :)

~Cody http://www.threadbound.com

By: Curt Sampson

Curt Sampson — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:19:18 +0000

If you're worried about lots of mail messages going out, a better way to deal with this sort of thing might be to hook it in to your network monitoring system. When the status of your "database queries" object in the monitoring system goes yellow (or red, or whatever), you can have the monitoring system deal with sending an e-mail, escalating appropriately, and so on. Click on it to see the issues, and the deal with them as necessary, and clear the alert.

For this particular thing, though, I have to say I've not over the past few years been having database queries fail in production. I attribute this to a couple of things: using PostgreSQL with appropriate constraints (so that it's not possible for invalid data to get into the DB), and a comprehensive automated test framework that ensures that every query is well tested.

By: Ryan Campbell

Ryan Campbell — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 01:09:37 +0000

I agree that early on errors come in clumps, but it tends to slow down. It would actually make sense to add the ability to turn emailing on and off for specific files. If a feature is just released, you may want to turn them off until a lot of testing has occured. But for stable portions of a product, I imagine the amount of emails would still be reasonable.

I also find that known bugs in stable portions of the product will get fixed faster if I am reminded 20 times a day via email that a problem happened.

By: Edward Z. Yang

Edward Z. Yang — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:19:08 +0000

I also use debug_backtrace() trickery to grab the line and file: saves you from having to manually pass the constants. However, I use it for a different purpose...

Schlossnagle has this to say about emailing errors (and I paraphrase): The thing about it is that errors tend to occur in clumps. That means that your nifty error handler might end up sending 1000 emails to you before you get in and shut it off. RSS might make more sense, but then again, what you'd probably want to do is log the error, and then have the RSS generator parse the log.

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 22:10:59 +0000

Simple but sweet.

By: Wouter

Wouter — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:58:20 +0000

I'd like to use set_error_handler to overrule the default error handler and create my own. This way, I can show an "oops something bad happened" page, while (possibly) mailing me and fellow developers an extensive error report.

By overriding PHP's error handler you'll also get the line number and besides that even more handy information like the error type (warning, notice, etc) and file in which the error occured. In combination with the debug_backtrace function() in PHP, you can make some excellent custom error handlers.