Help with Oracle Services for MTS, please

I'm an experienced Oracle DBA, but I'm just now getting involved with Windows 2000 and COM+ applications, and now Oracle Services for MTS, which I'll call ORAMTS in this posting. I have read the documentation on this product, and have apparently successfully installed it, but I'm still unclear about exactly when it's required. For background, we're developing an application in Visual Basic and ASP's, that uses ADO for database access.

Here are some specific questions that I hope someone can answer. And when I say MTS, I'm referring to Microsoft Transaction Server, and not Oracle's multi-threaded server.

1. Testing reveals that components that only inquire against Oracle seem to work just fine without ORAMTS installed. Is this as expected?
2. The manual says that ORAMTS is required if we want "client-side connection pooling" in MTS. Does this happen automatically, or is there something I need to do to enable it?
3. Is it true that there is nothing we need to do in the VB source code for ORAMTS, when using ADO? That is, all the ORAMTS finagling "just happens" whenever it is necessary?
4. The manual says that all updates in a transaction are in a single component, then we don't have to mark that component as transactional, and can use "the Oracle commit or rollback functions" to control the transaction, and avoid the overhead of ORAMTS. Is this true in our VB/ADO scenario? If so, do we really want to get into this, or should we "keep it simple, stupid", and make all the transactions the same, and leave commit/rollback logic to MTS?

We're very new at this new technology, and don't know anyone who's actually done it with Oracle before. If someone wants to share knowledge in this area, we'd really appreciate it.

Terry Phelps
American Commercial Lines
Jeffersonville, IN
email: terryp at acbl dot net

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Before you buy. Received on Wed Aug 23 2000 - 13:16:53 CDT