maximum connections using oracle and VB6

I've been googling this for ages but have had no success so I'm hoping somebody out there can point me in the right direction:

I have a small application that screen scrapes financial data from a market URL specified as a switch on the command line when the app is started. I want to store the data collected in a database, probably Oracle.

I will be tracking in the order of 1000+ different markets per day so I have made the app very small and without a form. A master program determines which markets should be tracked and launches a shell instance of the app with the relevant market URL.

This means I may have 1000+ instances of the same program running, each tracking a different market and dumping the data into the database. The sampling frequency is not yet decided as too high a sampling rate would no doubt cripple the machine(s).

Assuming each instance opens its own connection to the database, will I run out of connections?

I realise there is a time overhead for creating and dropping a connection which won't be a problem if the market being tracked is only sampled every 10 minutes, but if it was being done every second I would probably want to keep the connection open.

Am I going to run out of resources, either processor or database?

Is there a better way of doing this? I'm using VB6 and can't see a way of making "threads" so this is the only solution I have been able to come up with.

TIA for any insights offered. Received on Wed Aug 03 2005 - 00:16:29 CEST