At 11:27 PM 13/01/2004 +1300, you wrote:

>Paul,
>
>it seems that you are suffering from the same delusions we were. Helen
>set us striaght in the firebird forum. Here it is in plain English :-)
>
>1. Autocommit true does soft commits, which does not release the
>transaction. So I suggest dont use it unless the transaction has been
>setup as readonly and you use it only for selects.
>
>2. Selects require a commit too (unless performed with a readonly
>transactrion).

Read-only transactions are active transactions and still require a commit
or rollback to complete. The difference is that read-only transactions
don't hold up the advance of the OIT. A long-running read-only transaction
could keep the OAT at a very old number but it's not "interesting" from the
POV of garbage collection. It's the OIT ("Transaction - oldest") that
matters most, because the obsolete record versions that were stored during
it or after it will not be garbage collected (except by gbak, of course).

Helen