COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT in Hibernate - oracle

Question

Is it possible to execute COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT in Hibernate?

Answer 1

I didn't search extensively but I couldn't find any evidence that you can access this functionality at the JDBC driver level.
And this leaves you with the option to specify the COMMIT_WRITE parameter at the instance or session level, if this makes sense for you.
Just in case, let me quote this blog post (I'm pasting the content for reference because the original site is either unavailable or dead and I had to use Google Cache):
Using "Commit Write Batch Nowait" from within JDBC
Anyone who has used the new
asynchronous commit feature of Oracle
10.2 will be aware that it's very useful for transaction processing
systems that would traditionally be
bound by log_file_sync wait events.
COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT is faster
because it doesn't wait for a message
assuring it that the transaction is
safely in the redo log - instead it
assumes it will make it. This nearly
eliminates log_file_sync events. It
also arguably undermines the whole
purpose of commit, but there are many
situations where the loss of a
particular transaction (say to delete
a completed session) is perfectly
survivable and far more preferable
than being unable to serve incoming
requests because all your connections
are busy with log_file_sync wait
events.
The problem anyone using Oracle's JDBC
driver is that neither the 10.2 or
11.1 drivers have any extensions which allow you to access this functionality
easily - while Oracle have lots of
vendor specific extensions for all
sorts of things support for async
commit is missing.
This means you can:
Turn on async commit at the instance level by messing with the
COMMIT_WRITE init.ora parameter.
There's a really good chance this will
get you fired, as throughout the
entire system COMMIT will be
asynchronous. While we think this is
insane for production systems there
are times where setting it on a
development box makes sense, as if you
are 80% log file sync bound setting
COMMIT_WRITE to COMMIT WRITE BATCH
NOWAIT will allow you to see what
problems you face if you can somehow
fix your current ones.
Change COMMIT_WRITE at the session level. This isn't as dangerous as
doing it system wide but it's hard to
see it being viable for a real world
system with transactions people care
about.
Prepare and use a PL/SQL block that goes "BEGIN COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT;
END". This is safer than the first
two ideas but still involves a network
round trip.
Wrap your statement in an anonymous block with an asynchronous commit.
This is the best approach we've seen.
Your code will look something like
this:
BEGIN
--
insert into generic_table
(a_col, another_col, yet_another_col)
values
(?,?,?);
--
COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT;
--
END;

Answer 2

I was looking for a way to do this but couldn't get it working in a test. The reason for my hold up was that I was expecting the wrong results from my test. I was testing by manually acquiring a shared table lock to simulate adding an index - but in this case, the insert query acquires the lock, not the commit. So it doesn't actually solve the problem I was looking to solve. I got round my problem by moving these insertions into a background queue, so that they don't hold up the main web request.
Anyway I think you can still do asynchronous commits in Hibernate. Basically you can use the Session.doWork() method to get access to the native Connection object (or in older versions of Hibernate, the Session.connection() method). I also moved the commit SQL into a strategy interface, so that we can run our HSQLDB-based tests which wouldn't understand the Oracle specific SQL.
In fact, it may be fine to use Session.createSQLQuery and give that the SQL, avoiding having to directly use Connection. Try it and see how it works.
private NativeStrategy nativeStrategy = new OracleStrategy();
interface NativeStrategy {
String commit();
}
public static final class OracleStrategy implements NativeStrategy {
public String commit() {
return "COMMIT WRITE BATCH NOWAIT";
}
}
public void saveAsynchronously(MyItem item) {
session.save(item);
session.flush();
// Try to issue an asynchronous commit where supported.
session.doWork(new Work() {
public void execute(Connection connection) throws SQLException {
Statement commit = connection.createStatement();
try {
commit.execute( nativeStrategy.commit() );
} finally {
commit.close();
}
}
});
}