Re: A row locking problem that baffles all...

On Fri, 15 Jan 1999 04:04:51 GMT, "Stephen Tenberg" <STenberg_at_fcs-usa.com> wrote:

>This is just a classic mistake programmers have been making for the past 40
>years, and probably will until the end of time.
>
>It is *always* a programming error to lock a record when some further manual
>intervention is required. In such cases someone will inevitably walk away
>at the wrong time.

The original question was to establish who caused the block to the nowait lock. The scenario was a worst case situation.

Our system is well established, successfully processing a massive amount of sensitive data, and so uses pessimistic locking so this sensitive data isn't compromised. Pessimistic locking has the shortfall that you mention (someone might leave a transaction with a lock open), but some of the biggest RDBs in the world use Pessimistic locking. 99.999% of all users commit / rollback their work as soon as they finish, and the others which hold locks for longer rarely cause problems as Oracle always has facilities to close sessions/kill sessions/warn sessions that their transaction/lock has been open too long. I am forced to disagree with your original statement.

Kind Regards
Paul Scott
aspscott_at_tcp.co.uk
^^ remove 'as' anti-spam prefix to E-mail Received on Fri Jan 15 1999 - 07:43:22 CST