Re: Oracel not thread safe?

Bob Acker wrote:
>
> John, what do you mean by thread safe? This I think is important to me
> as I am currently using 7.2 on NT. (Will go to 7.3 when designer
> supports it.)

Thread-safe (reentrant) code allows and expects multiple threads within a single process to access it simultaneously. Among other things, such code must make judicious use of static and global variables to avoid collisions between threads attempting to access and/or modify such data simultaneously.

If you attempt to call Oracle 7.2 library functions from a multithreaded process, you're playing with fire, unless you strictly avoid having two or more threads access Oracle code at the same time (presumably via mutex). In most cases, your program will crash and burn. If it doesn't, something awful will probably happen that's just as bad.

Oracle 7.3's code has been revamped to allow multithreaded access without such concerns, hence it is "thread safe."

-- 

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John Verbil                          | mailto:jverbil_at_uswest.com
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