the upgrade from hell

no. i exported using xampp's phpmyadmin, and imported to new database using phpmyadmin on cpanel.

i have 6 versions of my database now in production, and edit the settings.php file to point to the latest one after each upload.

it is so interesting that the database can make such as difference. my current working one (christmas2) just has the 6.14 changes, and no memory fails, but won't display the cck date in my events view.

but there were problems even before my upgrade - i had tried to update a view, and got a memory fail. that's why i decided to do a full upgrade (apart from the security release) - it needed a complete overhaul for christmas. including the ability to swap between years.

every other database gives me memory issues, so there is some setting on my databases causing this.
for example on christmas3, events fails (using cck date), but the churchservices view works (using cck datetime), and admin fails.
on christmas5 i deleted everything to do with events, and a few more views fail, including gallery (which is a straight forward image module). but my new christmasgifts and wishlist functions work, because they have nothing to do with dates.

it just gets to me that it works perfectly on my laptop.

it has to be a setting on the database. the fact that i can swap back to database christmas2 and have my events view working, implies this.
i really hate environment issues.

This may be the issue, but without looking at the sql file and the server, I have no real way of knowing..
It does seem to be a common issue when export from local to production.
http://drupal.org/node/176732 ;Character encoding problem after importing database

just found something interesting in views.

the ones that are failing with memory exceeded, are the ones where i filter by node updated date.
When I add the filter, instead of selecting Content, I select Date, even though its a node field I am filtering on.
The reason for this is that it lets me specify the granulation of the filter, so I can have a simple dropdown field for 2009, instead of saying date > yyyymmdd hhmmss.

Now with the devel module installed and display turned on, it gives me details of the code and performance at the bottom of the page.
On these views with the node updated filter, the devel module displays:
"missing join node node".

Not that I built the code - it was generated by the views module.
A missing join would be a good reason for excessive memory use (although why it would also cause the image gallery to fail, when there was no date filter, is hard to understand. it seemed to make the problem bigger and affect the rest of the site.)

went back to the laptop and edited all my views and removed the date filter by year. how sad.
uploaded the database.
this time the error was:
but still ended up with a problem on events
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 404890 bytes) in includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 41

sigh.
went back to the laptop.
used the devel clear cache
ran update.php
ran cron
visited each view page, to ensure it was cached.
uploaded the database.
almost had it for a while.
all the functions seemed to work in production (although a shadow of their former selves, without location and fancy dates and date filters).
edited an event.
was about to create a new event, when i noticed the previous content type still appeared to be there in the Create Content menu. So there were two events, which would have confused people, especially when the top one that wasn't used any more, gave you a blank screen.
decided to try and edit the navigation menu in production.
but still ended up with a problem on events
Memory exceeded on form.inc.
alas.