Cillian Sharkey writes:

> The bizarre part is that there are *no* error messages and the operation
> appears to be successful i.e. for an UPDATE it returns that 1 row was
> affected even though the operation never took effect!

What does the PostgreSQL log say?  I find when debugging DBI stuff
that looking at the log is most helpful: sometimes I find the SQL
that I've sent is not quite what I wanted to send. :-)  On my
development systems I have '-d 2' as an argument when starting
the postmaster.  Yes, you need automatic log file rotation with
this. :-)

> Now if I try an UPDATE on a non-existant row it does return a value of
> zero as expected (i.e. no row was updated).

Are you 100% sure that the value returned is the row count?

> Does anyone else have this setup working on 1.6?

Not quite ... PostgresSQL 7.2.2 on some 1.5.1 hosts.

> #!/usr/pkg/bin/perl -w
> ...

Works here, too, and I don't see anything wrong with it.  So ... check
the log file.

Giles