Re: experience with dbms_pipes ?!

Stefan Richter <SRICHTER_at_Materna.DE> wrote:

>I'm interesting in reading some opinions about ORACLE dbms_pipes:
 

> - possible problems with performance
> - " bugs
> - difficult/easy to implement
> - ...

First, read the text of the SYS.dbms_pipes package specification. It tells you quite a bit.

In my experience, pipes have extremely good performance and quite low overhead. Note that pipes don't wait on a COMMIT, so if you are looking for notification of completed work, you might be better off with ALERTS instead.

One of the trade offs is that the contents of the pipe will hang around, so you can log in and check the pipe for anything that has accumulated since the last time you looked. An alert, by contrast, can only be noticed if you're 'registered' for it, i.e. logged on and looking (and doing a WAITONE or WAITANY).

IMHO, pipes and alerts are way cool. They deserve a lot more attention than they currently get.

Cheers.

 -Tom

-- 
Thomas B. Cox   tcox_at_netcom.com
Author of _Oracle Workgroup Server Handbook_, ISBN 0-07-881186-4
   See:   http://www.oracle.com/info/magazine/orapress.html