I am working on some high priority problems my previous team is having. The customers are mad and want a fix yesterday. The applications keep aborting with the same error messages. I traced this down in the code to some object locking code.This was Oracle Pro*C code that implements locks with records in a locks database table. When the users need to obtain a lock, they try to insert a record in this table. If anybody else has already inserted a similar record (has a lock), then the second lock immediately fails.
When the lock fails, the application displays an error message and aborts. This really irks our customer. So the first order of business is to make sure the application does not abort in this scenario. Next I figure we need the application to wait around a while until the lock might become free. why not let the Oracle database manage this contention? I figure somebody has already solved the queued lock problem. Why try to implement it again in our own code, especially when our implementation will be substandard.
