Q: Is Intersolv's Oracle ODBC Driver Thread-Safe?

The subject pretty much says it all, however, specifically: we're working (indirectly) with a subcontractor who has been developing a Oracle database and related applications. One of these applications, a data loader, consists of an NT service which responds to messages indicating an uploaded file needs to be processed (validated and inserted in several Oracle tables). The main NT service process spawns a thread to handle each upload file.

To make a long story short(er), the subcontractor claims that Oracle (or the ODBC driver, it's not clear which they are claiming) does not support multiple database connections/transactions from a single process, even when done from multiple threads. Therefore, they are using semaphores around database access routines (basically most of the threads' code, which seems to me to defeat the purpose).

My understanding was that, in general, ODBC, while not allowing multiple concurrent statements to be active on a given database connection, did allow multiple database connections to each have an active statement. Therefore, the data loader's threads could each use its own database connection and therefore have concurrent statements active against the Oracle database..

Am I understanding this correctly? Is this subcontractor confused (I won't even go into the quality of their work so far...)? Any light that could be shed on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Gerard

Gerard M. Averill
Associate Researcher

Center for Health Systems Research and Analysis University of Wisconsin, Madison

E-mail: gaverill_at_chsra.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 263-1331 Received on Tue Mar 11 1997 - 00:00:00 CST