Morning all,

just to add to the post below.

In Oracle - which I do in my real job - 'select ... for update' actually
locks the rows selected.
Normally Oracle will not lock a row (Oracle only locks rows, not pages or
tables - although you *can* explicitly lock a table) until you try to update
it. However, the 'select ... for update' pessimistically locks all the rows
at once.

This means of course, that a 'wait' will occur if someone else has the some
of the rows you want to update locked. To avoid this, you can 'select ...
for update nowait' instead which throws an exception (in the database) if
any of the rows to be updtated are locked.

In Oracle 9i, you can even 'select ... for update wait 5' to wait 5 seconds
for any locks to be released before throwing an exception.

Sorry - this is a bit OT for this list, but (slightly) interesting all the
same (maybe !).


Regards,
Norman.

-------------------------------------
Norman Dunbar
Database/Unix administrator
Lynx Financial Systems Ltd.
mailto:Norman.Dunbar@...
Tel: 0113 289 6265
Fax: 0113 289 3146
URL: http://www.Lynx-FS.com
-------------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: pepmallorca [mailto:pepmallorca@...]
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 5:24 PM
To: IBObjects@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [IBO] Re: select ... for update (2nd post)


Hello:

select ...for update is used in some databases like ORACLE, to
indicate the columns to be updated in a CURSOR:
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