Re: Thoughts on implicit/auto COMMITs

On 2018/03/15 07:34, Jeff Smith wrote:

> Brent is a friend and an ex-coworker. He wanted to share the background of this customer's scenario, in case it would help you with yours.
>
> I let Brent know some folks were having...fun...with his take on autocommit.
>
> Jeff
>
> _Heh heh heh, I can only imagine. The difference on optimistic vs pessimistic concurrency nailed it though - the default combo of optimistic & implicit transactions makes sense in Oracle, and the default of pessimistic and automatic transactions makes sense in SQL Server. It's when you change only one of those two settings that you're screwed._
>
> _The blog post stemmed from an app that had been written by SQL Server people, and then an Oracle guy came in and made a few changes. He switched to implicit transactions without understanding that everybody was doing single-line inserts/updates all over the place in code, not bothering to set transactions. He didn't understand the impact of what he was doing. (Not an Oracle jab by any means - the guy was well-meaning but just not prepared.)_
>
> _We got called in because performance went straight into the toilet. Even worse, rollbacks were rolling back completely unrelated transactions, and nobody knew why, hahaha_.

Ah, that context adds a lot to the assertion. I still disagree that autocommit is a good practice for applications, whether it's Oracle or SQL Server, but I understand where Brent's coming from.

And my intent wasn't to have "fun", but a sanity check for myself. IT changes constantly outside of my narrow focus, and as I've been following Brent's blog for years, that entry offers an opinion that is completely backwards of my understanding of how any modern RDBMS should work.

So, of course, I ask _Oracle_ people about it. :)

Thanks all for the sanity check!
Rich

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