Re: Oracle locking strategy: how does it work

On one of the Oracle versions we used, believe it was 7.3.1 or something, we had a problem where it would lock the whole table of any table that was constrained against the table you were trying to update. That is, if you update table A, and table B is involved in any kind of constraint with table A, both tables (NOT rows) would be locked, resulting in deadlocks rolling through the whole system - sometimes a process would even deadlock ITSELF as deadlocks cascaded through the database. This was an Oracle bug that was fixed in a later release, but it gave me a lot of grief for a while.

Benz

Kjell E. Johnsen <kjell.johnsen_at_cadnordic.no> wrote in article <34c30100.1106273_at_news.eunet.no>...
> On Sun, 18 Jan 1998 18:19:16 +0100, Ronald van Woensel
> <rvw_at_incore.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> > snip
>
> Hi
> You may have an Oracle version with a bug in it. We experienced the
> same problem with 'early' 7.3.* versions of Oracle. Even plain select
> statements produced deadlocks. Reporting this to Oracle support an
> upgrade was suggested to solve the problem, which it did. We now run
> version 7.3.2.3.0 on the NetWare server. On NT, however, the bug
> wasn't fixed until version 7.3.3.0. I don't know about other
> platforms.
>
> Hope this is to any help.
>
> Kjell
>
>
  Received on Mon Jan 19 1998 - 00:00:00 CST