Re: Experiences with Oracle Workspace Manager?

I don't have enormous experience with it, but I do a reasonably extensive demo of it on the 9i New Features course (which means it's not available in 8i, though the doco curiously says it 'supports' 8i -I imagine that means you can version a table in an 8i database over a database link). Is it easy to use? I'd say, definitely. For such a powerful feature, it's just one package and a handful of procedures -which take very few arguments, and they're obvious ones when they do. It's not often I can remember packages/procedures off the top of my head, but DBMS_WM is one of the rare exceptions... it helps that whoever was resonsible for writing the procedure names must have been a Java programmer in a previous life... not an underscore in sight! (dbms_wm.enableversioning, gotoworkspace, removeworkspace and so on!!).

I don't know whether it will work with spatial, because I've never used it -though the same doco I mentioned earlier also states that Oracle Spatial in 8i "uses" Workspace Manager, which suggests there should be no problem. But in any case, I see no intrinsic reason why it can't.... so long as you can access the tables directly, you can apply enableversioning to it, subject to the usual provisos (the tables can't be owned by SYS, there must be a Primary Key, column names must be under about 28 characters long, no AQ tables and so on... )

There are some reaonsable reasons why not to use it: space is the first and major one. Every workspace you create potentially means an extra copy of all rows in the table has to be stored (though it's good enough only to duplicate rows which are actually modified within a workspace, not the entire table just for the hell of it). Then if you enable history, or start setting savepoints, additional copies of the same modified row need to be stored. Extra columns are added to the table to start with (4 of them), and a bunch of additional indexes are created. So a fair bit of disk space is going to be needed. Other than that, I'd say that you need a really good  application front end to make it work properly... it's too easy at the command line to forget which workspace you're in, and find you've just made modelling changes to the live data (there's a getworkspace procedure which will tell you what workspace you're in, but even so... ). So long as you keep your wits about you, it's not a problem, but with a nice front end that makes it blindingly obvious which version of the data you're working with at any time, protecting you from the bare horrors of the command line, it's a piece of cake, and no wits are necessary!

Sorry not to be of more practical assistance, but it happens to be my second-favourite feature in 9i, and I wish it had been around about 9 years ago when I had to model budget outcomes from adjusting work schedules for Grounds Maintenance contracts. My life would have been so much easier!

Regards
HJR

--
----------------------------------------------
Resources for Oracle: http://www.hjrdba.com
===============================


"Christof Kaiser" <Kaiser_at_logiball.de> wrote in message
news:3C95D835.58ACB5EC_at_logiball.de...


> Hi Out There,

>

> I was wondering if naybody has experiences with the Oracle Workspace

> Manager that can be used for versioning of data.

> (e.g. edit data in a logical branch an merge it into the main version

> after doing so).

>

> I started to do a bit of research into this,

>

> - is it stable (with 9i or also with 8i)?

> - is it usable?

> - does it work with oracle spatial (it should)?

> - any comments or hint why not to use it.

>

> I just dont fell like I have to be the beta tester if sombody of you

> already suffered before ... ;-)

>

> Cheers

> Christof

>

>

>