Truncating a table while it is being accessed by a query

The environment was Oracle 8.1.7.4 running on Solaris.

• We had a data warehouse with an ETL process which ran every hour and took long enough that it ran constantly.
• Some of the ETL steps were truncating tables.
• Reports were failing intermittently with Ora-1410 (invalid rowid).

Through analysis of trace files I was able to demonstrate that the Ora-1410 errors only occurred when one of the tables being accessed by the report query was truncated while the query was running.

Now my question is: Shouldn't Oracle be preventing the truncate operation while another process was querying the table? If not, isn't this a bug?

Thanks,
Peter Schauss

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l