Transaction size limitation for serializable isolation level?

Hi All,

Our system configuration is Oracle 8.1.6 on Solaris 5.8 with servlet/jsp using
Tomcat as client. Transaction isolation level is set to serializable.

We have some long transactions, and we have been getting 'ORA-08177: Cannot serialize access for this
transaction' for these.
The error were also experienced when there's only one user on the database (ie.one transaction).
Redoing the transaction didn't help.

We're converting the isolation level to read commited. The reason being:
- We ran out of ideas on how to fix the problem. One of the things we tried
was modifying some parameters, eg. INITRANS, to no avail.
- Documentation mentions that serializable isolation level is suitable for
short transactions. I understand this will be the case for multi user environment, but to me this still doesn't explain the reason why we get the error when there's only one user/transaction.

However, I'm still very curious why we were getting the errors. What are the causes of 'ORA-08177' other than 'when a serializable transaction tries to update or delete data modified by a transaction that commits after the serializable transaction began'?

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Lucy Received on Fri Apr 16 2004 - 00:32:39 CDT