Re: Oracle eats up memory

Poh wrote:
>
> It is possible that the connections at the client were not closed.
> Please forgive my ignorance as I a newbie to programming with
> ADO and Oracle. I am taking over as the administrator and programmer

I wish you well. Anyone taking over such a situation without adequate training .... Suggest you look at the 'Admin Concepts' manual in the docco link below and possibly look at O'Reilly's 'Oracle Essentials' (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oressentials2/) to get you up to speed conceptually. Others have excellent suggestions for more details.

> have both left. Does ADO releases the connection only by closing the
> connection? I see that one of my clients have the connections that are
> closed
> only when the threads exit.

I am not deeply familiar with ADO, as that is a Microsoft mechanism, not an Oracle one.

However, I do know that most, if not all, database interaction mechanisms allow explicit as well as implicit connection creation and release. It's at release (close) that the client application tells the server to free resources.

I also know that a favorite trick of developers is to rely on the implicit variant and that usually only releases on termination of the thread that initiated the call. (In other words, sloppy programmers won't write the connect and release calls.)

If the developer or the calling app doesn't explicitly free the resources, the server has to wait until it detects a disconnect before it can take action. I suspect that is you problem.

>
> I am not upgrading to 8.1.7 as I has just took over the system and I am not
> sure
> what are the implications of upgrading to 8.1.7. Are there any new bugs in
> 8.1.7 that does not exist in 8.1.5.? Can I use the current odbc driver for
> my client
> after the upgrade? Is there any site that I can find answers to all these?
> Thanks.

8.1.5 was Oracle8i Release 1. It went through several bug fixes and patches, then was superceeded by Release 2 and Release 3. It is no longer supported.

8.1.7 is Oracle8i Release 3 and has a number of patches applied. While there may be new bugs, it is also stable and popular enough that most of these are now eliminated.

If you are paying support (e.g. have a userid on http://metalink.oracle.com), you would have access to the upgrades. There are many, many reasons for upgrding, and there are many, many more for going straight to 9.2.0.4

Several resources I recommend:

http://otn.oracle.com << free information & support via monitored discussion groups
http://docs.oracle.com << all docco for all products (free) http://metalink.oracle.com << final authority on technical questions (paid service) Received on Wed Nov 05 2003 - 17:41:30 CST