Re: undo retention

Sybrand wrote:

>It is bad in itself. Know what a transaction is? a *logical* unit of work

It took me a while to figure out what was bothering me about this, since I agree with it, and yet don't disagree with Mark.

This issue is, whether it is an atomic unit of work. Since Oracle doesn't have transaction levels, this can become ambiguous. A billing report is likely to be the summation for each customer of how much they owe at a particular time, perhaps "now." Perhaps it would make more business sense that "now" is at the end of a billing day for each customer rather than at the beginning of all customers. If the billing run for all customers takes two days and will upset a customer if that customer makes a payment in the middle and it doesn't show up... and it can get a lot more complex when you throw aging of receiveables into the mix, especially when you have some auto mechanism to stop them from ordering more stuff, credits, buy-one-get-one-free, etc..

Then of course there is the more obvious physical reason that configuration allowing for the largest unit of work may be more than the disk that they have...

But I do agree, it too often is an indicator that someone isn't fixing the actual problem, especially when the question involves having recently upgraded - there may well be fixes for problems that no longer exist, or have never existed, or even were _caused_ by the "fix." That's why I squawked when I saw "commit at intervals."

jg

--
@home.com is bogus.
/home2/oracle$ ipcs -m|grep D-r
m      12294 0x00000000 D-rw-------    oracle       dba
/home2/oracle$ ipcrm -m 12294
ipcrm: shmid(12294): not found