AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION Page 1 of 2

http://oracleappsa2z.blogspot.in/2011/09/autonomous-transaction-or-how-to.html AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION or how to resolve mutating table error

AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION
Prior to Oracle8i, there was no way in which some SQL operations within a transaction could be committed independent of the rest of the operations. Oracle allows this, however, through autonomous transactions.

An autonomous transaction is a transaction that is started within the context of another transaction, known as parent transaction, but is independent of it. The autonomous transaction can be committed or rolled back regardless of the state of the parent transaction.
Ex: CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION_TRIGGER after insert on student DECLARE pragma autonomous_transaction; BEGIN update student set marks = 555; commit; END AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION_TRIGGER; Output: SQL> select * from student; NO NA MARKS ----- ----- -- ---------1 a 111 2 b 222 3 c 300 SQL> insert into student values(4,'d',444); SQL> select * from student; NO NA MARKS ---- ------ -- ---------1 a 555 2 b 555 3 c 555 4 d 444 RESTRICTIONS ON AUTONOMOUS TRANSACTION If an autonomous transaction attempts to access a resource held by the main transaction, a deadlock can occur in you program. You cannot mark all programs in a package as autonomous with a single PRAGMAdeclaration. You must indicate autonomous transactions explicity in each program.

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To exit without errors from an autonomous transaction program that has executed at least one INSERT or UPDATE or DELETE, you must perform an explicit commit or rollback. The COMMIT and ROLLBACK statements end the active autonomous transaction, but they do not force the termination of the autonomous routine. You can have multiple COMMITand/or ROLLBACK statements inside your autonomous block. You cannot rollback to a savepoint set in the main transaction. The TRANSACTIONS parameter in the oracle initialization file specifies the maximum number of transactions allowed concurrently in a session. The default value is 75 for this, but you can increase the limit. MUTATING TABLES There are restrictions on the tables and columns that a trigger body may access. In order to define these restrictions, it is necessary to understand mutating and constraining tables. A mutating table is table that is currently being modified by a DML statement and the trigger event also DML statement. A mutating table error occurs when a row-level trigger tries to examine or change a table that is already undergoing change. A constraining table is a table that might need to be read from for a referential integrity constraint. Ex: CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER MUTATING_TRIGGER before delete on student for each row DECLARE ct number; BEGIN select count(*) into ct from student where no = :old.no; END MUTATING_TRIGGER; Output: SQL> delete student where no = 1; delete student where no = 1 * ERROR at line 1: ORA-04091: table SCOTT.STUDENT is mutating, trigger/function may not see it ORA-06512: at "SCOTT.T", line 4 ORA-04088: error during execution of trigger 'SCOTT.T' HOW TO AVOID MUTATING TABLE ERROR? By using autonomous transaction By using statement level trigger