Re: pros/cons of dedicated vs. MTS connections?

Mark Bole wrote:

> In the Weblogic product, at least, there are settings for limiting the
> max number of connections in the pool. Every time reaching the max
> became a problem, in my experience, it was a bug in the application code
> that needed to be fixed regardless of connection pool issues.

Yeah, I think my run-ins with badly behaving app servers connection pools had more to do with configuration and development fubars than the actual product itself. Fact is however, that I've had more than just a few of these hit my instances. As a result I'm now always expecting worse-case and rather use MTS as I know that the app server will not overload the Oracle platform processing wise that way.

> And, if I am not in the housing or transport business...?

Then you use a different analogy? :-)

> There is no brick wall. Shared server and dedicated server can
> co-exist, you can switch back and forth at will.

Agree fully!

However, as MTS seem to have such a bad rep I'm using it (where I deem necessary for processing scalablity on the Oracle side) from the start. I rather want to run into MTS bugs and problems and issues sooner than later - as later is getting close to the max-number-processes brick wall on the Oracle server platform. Not that I have not had the odd weird issues with MTS, but I have yet to run into any MTS show stoppers.

> Valid, if you anticipate a scalability problem. On the other hand, I
> know of real-life situations where vast sums were expended in years past
> to address anticipated scalability problems that in fact never
> materialized.

And don't I know that.. Have seen that too often myself. But as I said Mark - if ABC buys me scalability and can be done within the constraints of the project, than I need a better reason that some old 8i articles and experiences that says not to use ABC as bad things may happen.

FWIW, I have design and coded TCP/IP servers myself using the exact same architecture as MTS (dispatchers, virtual circuits & shared servers). The scalability achieved is truly exceptional. Granted it is more complex. Granted there could be a performance knock. But so it bitmap indexes. So is partitioning. So is ADTs. So is FGAC. So is bulk processing. So is extprocs. So is every -single- advance feature in Oracle.

But if you understand the concepts and follow the basic guidelines, and above all apply some common sense and logic, the pros outweight the cons by -far-.

I have a big problem with blanket statements saying that something like MTS should only be considered as an exception. Especially when that is based primarily on (what seems to be isolated) experiences with an Oracle product that are two software gnerations old. That is what I call bs.

--
Billy