IDLE timeout parameter in Oracle

Question

We are stuck in a situation where one of our processes is taking 3 hours of computing without touching the database. The connection that was taken before calling the process

Answer 1

No matter what database you're using it's a bad idea to assume your connection is going to be live when you want to use it. One way to handle this is to create a function to return an active connection to the database in question, and to call it every time you need a handle/object/whatever for a given database. The routine maintains a list of databases and their associated connection object. If the connection object is live when the function is called all's well and good and the object is returned after the function does something with it to convince the database to keep the handle/object/whatever open. If there's no live connection object the routine opens a new one and returns that. It's useful to have a second routine that camps out on a timer that expires after 1 minute or so. When the timer expires and the second routine is called it looks through the list of database connections, looking for ones with no activity for a set amount of time (something significantly less that the database's session timeout value). Those that have been inactive for too long get closed and cleaned up.