So you keep getting a string of errors that say ‘Invalid BLOB handle in record buffer’ when you are working in GoldMine. What’s going on?

Is your database corrupt?
Should you stop working and make an immediate backup?
Do you nead to do database maintenance?
Is the program installed incorrectly?

The answer to all of these questions is NO. Nothing’s wrong with your GoldMine, really.

What it’s saying is that the list of items you’re looking at (the Activity list’s Real Time tab, for instance) has more items with notes than can be handled by your Borland Database Engine’s setting for the number of notes fields to cache in memory. If you attempt to view one of those items, it will be unable to show you the notes field and will have to tell you that the reference to the note (or the handle for the BLOB, in Borland’s vernacular) is not in memory (the record cache.) This doesn’t mean the program or database has a problem, it just means that with your current settings, you’re trying to work with too much data at one time.

The easy solution is to drill down on the data a bit more. Some options include focusing on a smaller date range, a single user, a certain activity type, etc. All of these options are available in the Activity List’s right-click menu and can help to curb this error (or eliminate it entirely!).

If you continue to receive this error on even relatively short lists of information, you may need to increase the number of BLOBs that are cached in memory at any given time.

To change this setting, open the BDE Administrator from the GoldMine tools menu (or the Windows Control Panel) and locate the proper database alias*. Highlight it and note the BLOBS TO CACHE setting on the right side. Adjust it, as necessary. The higher the number you set, the more items you can work with in places like the activity list. Keep in mind, however, that the higher the number, the worse your performance could be. A happy medium is typically anywhere from 512 to 1024.

*If you’re not sure of your database alias, you can check it under Help|About|System in GoldMine. It will be listed for the GoldMine Files item. Your alias may look something like this: MSSQL: GoldMine_Data: dbo. The important part in this example is GoldMine_Data.