datbase links and commits

I'm rather new to Oracle, so this may seem a stupid question, but:

At the hospital I where I work we have a patient database (PIMS) running on Oracle 7.3, and a radiology information system (RIS) running on an Oracle 8.06 db. Occasionally, a patient arrive at the x-ray department without any previous contact with the hospital. Then this patient does not exist in the Master Patient Index (MPI) in PIMS. My task is to write a procedure, stored at the RIS database which should perform the following operations:

1. Find the patient in the Folkregister (a database containing names, birthdays and such on all norwegians). A copy of the Folkregister resides in the PIMS database.
2. Insert the patient from the Folkregister into the MPI
3. Return patient data to RIS

Step 2 is important, since other hospital systems must be updated if a new patient arrives. Unfortunately this is also my problem, since it requires a procedure on the PIMS database, and this procedure contains a COMMIT statement. It's a rather complex procedure, I can't just comment out the offending statement without unforeseen consequences (me loosing my job for instance).

Before I abandon this approach, I just want to be sure: There is no way to execute a commit (or rollback) statement within a procedure stored on a remote database?

Thank you

LarsG Received on Thu Nov 02 2000 - 09:16:07 CST