From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-07-02T06:16:56+09:00
Subject: Re: DBD::Oracle9 and non-blocking mode

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 01:04:00AM +0900, Jim Cain wrote:
> I'm about ready to make available an early copy of my library, but first 
> I have some questions regarding non-blocking mode. I've never actually 
> used this feature, so I'd like to hear from those that do how they use 
> it. Do you need more support for it beyond simply setting/resetting the 
> mode? What is the most convenient way for you to be notified that an OCI 
> call is still executing? When a call is still running, would you like to 
> call Statement#execute again to see if it's finished, or would you like 
> some other method?

I have used it briefly: setting non-blocking mode on Takehiro's ruby-oci8
library, I was able to get several threads to run concurrent slow Oracle
queries. It didn't need any special support for notification; I just let
each thread block until its particular query had finished. (ruby-oci8 deals
with this by polling the OCI library at increasing intervals until OCI says
the query has completed, and then fetches the results)

However, I wasn't particularly happy with this approach, so in the end I
changed my application to run as multiple processes (in fact running under
FastCGI, so Apache controls the number of processes which are spawned), each
of which is a single thread so I don't care if OCI blocks.

Regards,

Brian.