Re: Wait for lock?

dan wright wrote:
>
> Interesting that I got a much greater response from the Informix
> newsfroup about using Oracle after heavy use of Informix than I did from
> the Oracle newsfroup.
>
> Anyway - apparently Oracle has no equivalent to Informix's ability to
> specify a timeout period when waiting for a lock.
>
> Is this correct? You can either tell Oracle to wait forever, or to not
> wait at all.
>
> So, if I expect the possibility of contention on a database table, but
> setting isolation to dirty read is not an option, I can't tell Oracle to
> keep trying for a few seconds?
>
> So, what in Informix would be a simple "SET LOCK MODE TO WAIT 5" would
> be implemented by trapping lock exceptions and retrying several times
> before giving up. What a pain....
>
> And another thing - just what is the ANSI standard for an outer join? I
> thought both Informix and Oracle were ANSI-compliant, but the syntax for
> outer joins doesn't seem similar at all (At least in Informix it's
> simple and obvious).....
> (Incidentally Sybase has a really screwed up syntax for outer joins as
> well)
>
> Thanks for any input

This is sort of true - the NATIVE ability for a timeout is not there, but its trivial to implement with basically

loop up to 'x' times
  try get lock
  if ok, then break out of loop
  if not, the sleep 1 second and loop around end of loop

which gives you a timeout of 'x' seconds..

HTH

-- 
===========================================
Connor McDonald
http://www.oracledba.co.uk

We are born naked, wet and hungry...then things get worse