Question

Sporadic DX Contention

Asked by: Jeffreymarcum

We have a PL/SQL package that calls another package over a database link. The remote packaged procedure is an autonomous transaction that updates some tables and then calls another package back across another database link to the original Oracle instance. That package updates some other data and returns to the remote instance which commits the autonomous transaction and returns to the first package.

Sporadically, the original session then hangs and has to be killed. It's one of those situations where just killing it doesnt work; you have to also kill the Unix process as well.

The process works intermittently with seemingly no consistency as to where it ends up locking.  It comes back from the remote process where that DOES consistently work/commit its data - it's after the fact that we get the lock.

We've looked at the V$ tables and it doesn't appear that any row locking is occurring. The local process is not updating any of the data that the remote process (or it's local surrogate) is touching. The session that hangs shows an event "DX - Contention". I don't know whether or not that is significant, but it's consistent.

I'm not even positive that the problem is this convoluted distributed transaction and not something else. Anyone have any ideas?

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Asked On
2008-07-01 at 14:21:41ID23531736
Tags

Oracle 10g

Topics

Oracle 10.x

,

Oracle 9.x

,

PL / SQL

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: dvzPosted on 2008-07-01 at 20:19:17ID: 21913185

You didn't mention that your instance is crashing with ORA-600, so I'm going to go with the advice from Metalink that you may be affected by bug #4627237, which is patched in 10.2.0.3.

If an autonomous procedure which accesses a remote database is invoked
inside a distributed transaction which itself accesses the remote
database, then if the remote instance uses shared servers a
deadlock can occur.


Workaround:  
  Use dedicated servers

 

by: JeffreymarcumPosted on 2008-07-02 at 07:10:29ID: 21916521

dvz,
Thanks for the insight. We're investigating your solution today and were running some traces.  We have one discrepancy though... We are using dedicated servers. We found a similar bug in Metalink - bug 4648039 which details the problem above in a dedicated environment. Anyway, I'll accept your solution and assign points. If you can provide any more information, we would appreciate it.

Based on your late posting time, my team was curious of your location.  We're in Florida

 

by: dvzPosted on 2008-07-02 at 07:18:28ID: 21916619

Dayton, Ohio.  I was up working on First Lego League stuff at home.  :)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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