Experiences with Oracle Workspace Manager?
Christof Kaiser
I was wondering if naybody has experiences with the Oracle Workspace
Manager that can be used for versioning of data.
(e.g. edit data in a logical branch an merge it into the main version
after doing so).
I started to do a bit of research into this,
- is it stable (with 9i or also with 8i)?
- is it usable?
- does it work with oracle spatial (it should)?
- any comments or hint why not to use it.
I just dont fell like I have to be the beta tester if sombody of you
already suffered before ... ;-)
Cheers
Christof
Howard J. Rogers
demo of it on the 9i New Features course (which means it's not available in
8i, though the doco curiously says it 'supports' 8i -I imagine that means
you can version a table in an 8i database over a database link). Is it easy
to use? I'd say, definitely. For such a powerful feature, it's just one
package and a handful of procedures -which take very few arguments, and
they're obvious ones when they do. It's not often I can remember
packages/procedures off the top of my head, but DBMS_WM is one of the rare
exceptions... it helps that whoever was resonsible for writing the procedure
names must have been a Java programmer in a previous life... not an
underscore in sight! (dbms_wm.enableversioning, gotoworkspace,
removeworkspace and so on!!).
I don't know whether it will work with spatial, because I've never used
it -though the same doco I mentioned earlier also states that Oracle Spatial
in 8i "uses" Workspace Manager, which suggests there should be no problem.
But in any case, I see no intrinsic reason why it can't.... so long as you
can access the tables directly, you can apply enableversioning to it,
subject to the usual provisos (the tables can't be owned by SYS, there must
be a Primary Key, column names must be under about 28 characters long, no AQ
tables and so on... )
There are some reaonsable reasons why not to use it: space is the first and
major one. Every workspace you create potentially means an extra copy of
all rows in the table has to be stored (though it's good enough only to
duplicate rows which are actually modified within a workspace, not the
entire table just for the hell of it). Then if you enable history, or
start setting savepoints, additional copies of the same modified row need to
be stored. Extra columns are added to the table to start with (4 of them),
and a bunch of additional indexes are created. So a fair bit of disk space
is going to be needed. Other than that, I'd say that you need a really good
application front end to make it work properly... it's too easy at the
command line to forget which workspace you're in, and find you've just made
modelling changes to the live data (there's a getworkspace procedure which
will tell you what workspace you're in, but even so... ). So long as you
keep your wits about you, it's not a problem, but with a nice front end that
makes it blindingly obvious which version of the data you're working with at
any time, protecting you from the bare horrors of the command line, it's a
piece of cake, and no wits are necessary!
Sorry not to be of more practical assistance, but it happens to be my
second-favourite feature in 9i, and I wish it had been around about 9 years
ago when I had to model budget outcomes from adjusting work schedules for
Grounds Maintenance contracts. My life would have been so much easier!
Regards
HJR
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"Christof Kaiser" <Kai...@logiball.de> wrote in message
news:3C95D835...@logiball.de...
Pete Sharman
deal with long running transactions so spatial makes sense. It's only in 9i, so
you won't get it working in 8i.
HTH.
Pete
In article <3C95D835...@logiball.de>, Christof says...
HTH. Additions and corrections welcome.
Pete
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