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Troubleshooting applications on Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS provides specific and descriptive errors to help you troubleshoot problems while interacting with the Amazon RDS API.

For information about troubleshooting for Amazon RDS DB instances, see Troubleshooting for Amazon RDS.

Retrieving errors

Typically, you want your application to check whether a request generated an error before you spend any time processing results. The easiest way to find out if an error occurred is to look for an Error node in the response from the Amazon RDS API.

XPath syntax provides a simple way to search for the presence of an Error node. It also provides a relatively easy way to retrieve the error code and message. The following code snippet uses Perl and the XML::XPath module to determine if an error occurred during a request. If an error occurred, the code prints the first error code and message in the response.

use XML::XPath; 
    my $xp = XML::XPath->new(xml =>$response); 
    if ( $xp->find("//Error") ) 
    {print "There was an error processing your request:\n", " Error code: ",
    $xp->findvalue("//Error[1]/Code"), "\n", " ",
    $xp->findvalue("//Error[1]/Message"), "\n\n"; }

Troubleshooting tips

We recommend the following processes to diagnose and resolve problems with the Amazon RDS API: