Helen, you are brilliant.

I prostrate myself in worship. :-)

You've just solved a BIG problem for me ... :-)

Thanks

Tim

At 09:47 PM 06/20/2003 +1000, you wrote:

>At 01:14 PM 20/06/2003 +0200, you wrote:
> >I am a bit concerned at using snapshot - isn't that like doing a dirty read?
>
>No!!! Firebird doesn't support dirty read! The order of isolation (from
>lowest to highest, in Delphi-talk) is ReadCommitted, Concurrency and
>Consistency. You never need Consistency except when you want to "freeze"
>the state of the database for your entire operation.
>
>All you want to do here is insert new records while your reporting
>procedure looks at some *other* records. Use two transactions - both
>Concurrency or ReadCommitted, it won't matter much, since you are not doing
>any updating. There is no potential for conflict here.
>
>By using Consistency, you are making it so that your transaction blocks any
>DML, even inserts, to preserve a frozen view of the whole database. In
>fact the only thing you want to freeze is the batch of transactions from
>the last shift, which the new shift doesn't even touch.
>
>heLen
>
>
>
>
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