Advanced queueing - one consumer, multiple threads

I am wondering whether it's possible in Oracle8i to have more than one process or thread collaborating to process incoming messages that are placed in a queue.
In particular, I'd like to ensure that each message is picked up by one and only one of the processes reading from the queue. It seems that in order to ensure this you would want all the processes to have the same consumer name. Is this possible, or will the processes block each other since they are, in fact, using the same consumer name?

e.g.
a) application MP is a message processor that is launched 10 times and issues DEQUEUE requests that block until a message is picked up b) as a message is placed on the queue one of the MPs picks it up and starts parsing and processing it
c) before the first MP finishes a second message arrives d) the next MP picks up this message and starts processing it and so on.

Comments/suggestions?

Ingo Peters Received on Mon Dec 13 1999 - 13:39:12 CST