UPS WorldShip crashes caused by new version of MySQL ODBC driver
At work, I’m in charge of getting information into and out of a big database of orders. That includes linking the shipping information to the UPS WorldShip program that our fulfillment team uses to automatically buy UPS service.
When the computer they’d been using out there for years just got too terribly slow, we got a new machine from our corporate overlords and I set up WorldShip and a ODBC connection to my MySQL database on it. But every time I tried to set up a “import map” in WorldShip (the part that tells it, “This field in the MySQL table is what you should use for that field in the shipment”), the program would crash.
I checked in the ODBC administrator that my connection was valid. I reinstalled WorldShip several times. I talked to WorldShip tech support for almost an hour. (The Tier 1 guy wasn’t a lot of help, but the Tier 2 woman seemed pretty helpful, checking a bunch of log files on my computer that I would have had no idea how to find, let alone interpret. She didn’t end up helping me much, but she seemed very knowledgable as we went through the detective process together, and she definitively told me that it was a problem with the ODBC driver.)
I even went so far as to reinstall Windows on the new machine, to ensure that there wasn’t some weird setting left on the computer from our other shop. But every time I tried to make that map in WorldShip, it was the same result: crash, crash, crash.
After beating my head against a wall for three days, I finally found the answer by going to another machine that was running WorldShip fine, including the connection to my database. I checked the MySQL ODBC driver there and it was an older version (3.51). But for the new machine, I had naively grabbed the latest version of the driver (5.1). I tried getting rid of 5.1 and installing 3.51 on the new computer, and it worked the first time. Success!
This entry is not intended to bore the daylights out of my family and friends. Instead, I write it so that the next time some poor sucker searches Google for “UPS WorldShip MySQL ODBC crash”, that person finds something more useful than I did.
July 10th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Great information Curtis! I only wish it had higher search index values so that I could have found it sooner. I had a customer who’s Worldship kept crashing each time we tried to make an export map. They had installed version 5.1 before I got involved and I had no reason to think that was the issue. And, like the rest of the world has found, the Worldship helpdesk just said it must be an ODBC issue and couldn’t help any more than that. I un-installed the 5.1 driver and installed 3.5 driver and viola, it works! Many thanks…
July 10th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Actually, Matt, I just wrote the post a few weeks ago, and since the very next day I’ve been getting consistent traffic from Google for several related keywords (like “worldship mysql 5.1 odbc” in your case).
I was just waiting for someone to chime in, saying that my solution fixed their problem too.
(Matt’s comment came from an @ups.com email address, so I’m glad that it’s helping regular people and UPS tech support folks.)
August 7th, 2009 at 6:52 am
We had figured this out on our own after about a half hour of troubleshooting (everything in WorldShip worked great until we tried doing exports). Retroactively searching to see if this was us or WorldShip at fault, glad to see we’re not the only ones!
November 27th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Great information! This is exactly what I needed. The UPS tech guy(Tier 1) had NO clue that exporting into MYSQL from Worldship was even possible. After finding this fix I was able to connect to my database and export the tracking number.
Thanks!
June 18th, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Thank you!!! I had issues with 5.01.11 but dug up a version of mysql odbc 5.01.09 that fixed the problem! I’ve also discovered that I need to install both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
November 29th, 2012 at 10:04 am
Thanks for posting this! We just setup Worldship and mapped our ODBC connection yesterday. I decided it would be useful to install the same version MySQL ODBC drivers on all of our shipping stations. v5.01.11 works perfectly for our Endicia system, while v5.02a fails miserably.
The WorldShip machine still had v3.5. And as soon as I tried v5.01 it quit working. Good to know it wasn’t a bizarre issue with our workstation…
If only these Oracle would make their drivers compatible from one release to the next!