Comments on: Using autonomous transactions for sleeping

By: Radino’s blog » How to implement sleeping

Radino’s blog » How to implement sleeping — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:13:39 +0000

[...] Autonomous transaction (In fact, this Tanel’s post inspired me to write this) (precision: seconds) [...]

By: tanelp

tanelp — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:48:42 +0000

Ok, nice proc, didn’t know about that.

However for my purpose (having sleep ability for scripts – without needing to change anything) this probably won’t work as this would require creation of objects into SYS schema…

By: gp

gp — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:21:28 +0000

Sorry, I forgot to say it is not created by default.
See $OH/rdbms/admin/userlock.sql

By: tanelp

tanelp — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:01:36 +0000

I’m not aware of any user_lock packages in recent Oracle versions. Are you sure this is a built-in Oracle package?

By: gp

gp — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:53:33 +0000

You can also use sleep procedure from user_lock package which by default is granted to public.
Note though that you must express the time granularity in tens of millisecs.

By: Log Buffer #99: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Log Buffer #99: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:45:53 +0000

[...] Poder looks into using autonomous transactions for sleeping. (No Tanel. You need healthy, natural sleep. Chew valerian root and get more exercise.) But [...]

By: Franco

Franco — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:23:00 +0000

Well done, great example of creative thinking! :-)

By: tanelp

tanelp — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:32:47 +0000

Gabe, yep this piece of code was only for demonstrating a hack what I’ve used in case where I needed to sleep in PL/SQL when having no access to DBMS_LOCK.

Even though it would is possible to add global session specific rows in that locking table, I would always prefer using DBMS_LOCK or Radino’s Java approach for real application sleeping.

Radino, very nice example by the way, but in that particular case I didn’t have Java installed in DB.

By: radino

radino — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:12:56 +0000

I think java.lang.Thread.sleep is better than dbms_lock and the approach you just described.
Code is very simle..

SQL> create or replace procedure sleep(x_millis in number) as language java 2 name 'java.lang.Thread.sleep(int)'; 3 /


Procedure created.
SQL> set timing on

SQL> exec sleep(10000);
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:10.02

By: Gabe

Gabe — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:55:38 +0000

Well, one may end up sleeping for more than ’seconds’.

In a multi-user environment, one sleep call will block another, since ‘rollback to savepoint’ does not close the transaction.