Wait for lock?

Interesting that I got a much greater response from the Informix newsfroup about using Oracle after heavy use of Informix than I did from the Oracle newsfroup.

Anyway - apparently Oracle has no equivalent to Informix's ability to specify a timeout period when waiting for a lock.

Is this correct? You can either tell Oracle to wait forever, or to not wait at all.

So, if I expect the possibility of contention on a database table, but setting isolation to dirty read is not an option, I can't tell Oracle to keep trying for a few seconds?

So, what in Informix would be a simple "SET LOCK MODE TO WAIT 5" would be implemented by trapping lock exceptions and retrying several times before giving up. What a pain....

And another thing - just what is the ANSI standard for an outer join? I thought both Informix and Oracle were ANSI-compliant, but the syntax for outer joins doesn't seem similar at all (At least in Informix it's simple and obvious).....
(Incidentally Sybase has a really screwed up syntax for outer joins as well)

Thanks for any input Received on Fri Sep 15 2000 - 20:03:39 CDT