Is the row updated since or while I am looking at it?

We are about to start developing some new applications on Oracle 8.0.4 on NT 4.0, SP3.

One of the developers I work with asked me the following question as he needs to determine how programmatically how he will handle this and what does Oracle provide, specifically, for this?

The question posed was: "How do I know if a row was updated since or while I am looking at it"?

So the question does Oracle use some sort of internal timestamp to track the row if it was updated or does the programmer need to set some of counter/indicator to track this?

Is there an initialization parameter relating to read_consistency that is set by default? Are there other options other than read_consistency?

The Oracle documenatation only speaks about this very generally.

What I am looking for is other than the locking mechanism. BTW, how do I tell programmatically which lock is held on a specific row?

Any information which you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

David Spaisman Received on Wed Dec 23 1998 - 00:06:48 CST