Re: OCI cursors and fork().

The original Oracle documentation was ambiguous on this point but I tested on various 7.x.x releases and found the child unable to process against a connection created in the parent. As soon as the child attempted to do anything Oracle-wise it screwed up the parent's connection as well. The best way is to determine the prerequisites, such as ROWID, of the data that you need to manipulate, in the parent and close your connection before forking the child. Once in the child open an explicit connection and perform the actions using the information passed from the parent.

There is an overhead with creating and closing the Oracle connection continuously in the parent so a better way may be to put the information in the child's process environment and fork/exec a separate executable which would then perform the child's actions. This way you could keep the parent's Oracle connection continuously.

...neil {actually: neil [dot] hulin [at] litech [dot] freeserve [dot] co [dot] uk} Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 16:38:41 CST