8: Transactions in Objective-C

Encoder ECC200 in Objective-C 8: Transactions

Transactions are a fundamental feature of all databases they are part of what distinguishes a database from a file system. And yet, they are often misunderstood and many developers do not even know that they are accidentally not using them. This chapter examines how transactions should be used in Oracle and also exposes some bad habits that may have been picked up when developing with other databases. In particular, we look at the implications of atomicity and how it affects statements in Oracle. We also discuss transaction control statements (COMMIT, SAVEPOINT, and ROLLBACK), integrity constraints, distributed transactions (the two-phase commit, or 2PC), and finally autonomous transactions.

It can be said that developers do not need to understand the detail of redo and undo as much as DBAs, but developers do need to know the role they play in the database. After first defining redo, we examine what exactly a COMMIT does. We discuss how to find out how much redo is being generated and how to significantly reduce the amount of redo generated by certain operations using the NOLOGGING clause. We also investigate redo generation in relation to issues such as block cleanout and log contention. In the undo section of the chapter, we examine the role of undo data and the operations that generate the most/least undo. Finally, we investigate the infamous ORA-01555: snapshot too old error, its possible causes, and how to avoid it.

Oracle now supports numerous table types. This chapter looks at each different type heap organized (i.e., the default, normal table), index organized, index clustered, hash clustered, nested, temporary, and object and discusses when, how, and why you should use them. Most of time, the heap organized table is sufficient, but this chapter will help you recognize when one of the other types might be more appropriate.

Indexes are a crucial aspect of your application design. Correct implementation requires an in-depth knowledge of the data, how it is distributed, and how it will be used. Too often, indexes are treated as an afterthought in application development, and performance suffers as a consequence. This chapter examines in detail the different types of indexes, including B*Tree, bitmap, functionbased, and application domain indexes, and discusses where they should and should not be used. I ll also answer some common queries in the Frequently Asked Questions and Myths About Indexes section, such as Do indexes work on views and Why isn t my index getting used

There are a lot of datatypes to choose from. This chapter explores each of the 22 built-in datatypes, explaining how they are implemented, and how and when to use each one. First up is a brief overview of National Language Support (NLS), a basic knowledge of which is necessary to fully understand the simple string types in Oracle. We then move on to the ubiquitous NUMBER type and look at the new Oracle 10g options for storage of numbers in the database. The LONG and LONG RAW types are covered, mostly from a historical perspective. The main objective here is to show how to deal with legacy LONG columns in applications and migrate them to the LOB type. Next, we delve into the various datatypes for storing dates and time, and investigating how to manipulate the various datatypes to get what we need from them. The ins and outs of time zone support are also covered. Next up are the LOB datatypes. We ll cover how they are stored and what each of the many settings such as IN ROW, CHUNK, RETENTION, CACHE, and so on mean to us. When dealing with LOBs, it is important to understand how they are implemented and how they are stored by default especially when it comes to tuning their retrieval and storage. We close the chapter by looking at the ROWID and UROWID types. These are special types, proprietary to Oracle, that represent the address of a row. We ll cover when to use them as a column datatype in a table (which is almost never!).