Re: Oracle 7 cannot have concurrent updates & queries ???

In article <3mghe3$8b9_at_romulus.ott.hookup.net>

           GrahamB_at_psac.com "Brian Graham" writes:

: It is my understanding the excessive fragmentation and limited free space
: in an Oracle block cause locking ALL data in that block. This problem can
: be resolved by exporting the data and re-importing it (of course drop all
: the data to avoid duplicate data).
: For the life of me I couldn't find the reference in the DBA manual.
: Perhaps this info was from an Oracle course or at IOUG.
: Hope this helps.
: Brian

You can get problems with extreme rates of update if there are lots of users attacking the same blocks: if there is no space available for a transaction to attach to a block it is (I believe) supposed to fail with an error message. Solution: tables/indexes should be created with larger values of INITRANS.

However, there used to be a problem with Version 6 which I could produce at will by careful byte-counting whereby a transaction would hang indefinitely when there were precisely zero bytes of space available on a table block. The support person I spoke to at Oracle UK denied that this happened, but declined to run the SQL*Plus script I sent them that demonstrated it.

Maybe something similar is happening here.

-- 
Jonathan Lewis