Re: Important note about asynchronous commit

Important quote
Reviewer: Jonathan Lewis from UK
<quote>

they basically mean "when you commit and you return from commit, the commit may or may NOT have happened yet, if the system fails after you return from commit but before the commit actually happens - you have to be prepared to REPLAY that transaction if necessary - something you can do in a batch load easily, but not so in a transactional system
<end quote>

I would phrase that somewhat differently - the commit has definitely happened, in that your changes are published and visible to all other sessions as from that SCN. However, as you say, the changes are not protected - if the system crashes, then your transaction may not be recoverable because it has not got into the log file. The D of ACID is no longer enforced.

Admittedly, when I talk about nologging operations I tend to make the rather melodramatic statement "if it's not in the log file it never happened" but then explain that as it's as far as the standby or recovery are concerned it never happened. For async commits, it happened, but there's a window (of up to about 3 seconds) where it won't guaranteeably recover or get to the standby.

We should also bear in mind that this makes official and choosable a phenomenon that has been happening inside pl/sql calls for years - commits publish data, but the transactions are not guaranteed to be synched to the log file until the pl/sql call ends and returns control to the called

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:60447282988010

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