Re: Allowing Oracle transactions to span client processes.

Sybrand Bakker <gooiditweg_at_sybrandb.nospam.demon.nl> wrote i

> >I'm hoping that the Oracle RDMS has some nifty way of doing this
> >(we're currently using 8.1.7 but we'll soon be on 9)?
>
> No, it doesn't. And 9i doesn't have it either. Better get rid of the
> mess of applications you have now.

Not all applications fit the nice and standard OLTP way Sybrand.

Consider a GIS application. New township development. Several applications by several depts will be used for doing the planning of sewarage & electricity, zoning, determining what servitudes are required, doing sub divisions on plots and turning them into erfs/erven (or whatever the correct English term is).

The output of this is a bunch of surveying & legal requirements that need to be met (there are two basic issues in government surveying processing - technical examination that deal with the actual survey maths and professional examination that deals with the legal aspects).

Once this has been done (maybe some months later), this "transaction" can be committed on the live system.

Thus, you need:

• the ability for mutiple apps to "work on the same transaction"
• the ability for that transaction to persist db-side without any active client sessions
• the ability for that transaction to remain open for long periods of time
• the ability to commit this in one step on the live data

And this smells like Oracle Workspace to me. Not an application mess. And this is exactly how integrated spatial & non-spatial databases (like Siemens's SICAD-GDB) worked in the 80's. Although this was a tad more dirtier than Oracle's Workspace implementation.

Think outside the box. Not everything is standard theory OLTP/OLAP.

--
Billy