ORA-08177: Cannot serialize access for this transaction

Hi,

My system configuration: Oracle 8.1.6 on Solaris 5.8 with servlet/jsp using Tomcat as client.
Transaction isolation level is set to serializable.

One of the tables has records referencing other records on the same table
(no circular referencing).

For a versioning purposes, when a record is updated, a new version of this record is created.
And in turn, using triggers, new version will be created for every referencing records.
A commit is performed at the end of these..

I have been getting the error 'ORA-08177: Cannot serialize access for this transaction'
when updating records that are referenced by a large number of records
(when updating records that generates large number of other record updates).
They're fine for other smaller transactions.

From Oracle manual:
'Oracle generates an error when a serializable transaction tries to update or
delete data modified by a transaction that commits after the serializable transaction began'
but I'm the only person initiating the transaction (I'm the only one on the test server),
so as far as I understand, there shouldn't be other transaction doing commits (???)

What could be causing the error?

Are there any system/table parameters to adjust to avoid getting this error?

Thank you,
Lucy Received on Thu Mar 04 2004 - 20:46:40 CST