What does commit and Start Transaction do? - symfony

when looking in symfony2 at the DB Queries I have 18 queries. (I think it is a lot) I am only updating one records.
Anyway. I also saw that some of thoses queries are named 'COMMIT' and 'START TRANSACTION'. Which is not very clear what it does. Any one could explain it to me? thanks.
here an exemple of what I have with Symfony2

Jovan's link is a better read, but in layman's terms, all queries between START TRANSACION and COMMIT are treated as a whole; meaning, if one of those queries fails then they all 'rollback' and fail. START TRANSACTION simply signifies the start of the grouping, and COMMIT finishes it. It's used when you logically need all of the queries to happen.
Say for instance you want to insert a new employee, and they have to have some permissions set. You need to insert into a user table and then a user_roles table.
Now, say you don't use the above, and try running the following two inserts:
INSERT INTO user (...);
INSERT INTO user_roles (...);
What if the first query works, but the second query doesn't? You'll have a 'dangling` user without any permissions, and they'll be sitting in database limbo.
If you instead use a transaction as shown below, you can make sure that either all the queries work, or none of them work.
START TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO user (...);
INSERT INTO user_roles (...);
COMMIT;

Because database transactions are very serious topic, instead of me trying to explain it here very briefly, I think it would be more beneficial to you to read this wiki article:
Wikipedia: Database Transactions

Related

System level trigger on DML Command in plsql

Suppose there are n number of tables in the database. Whatever insert,update,delete happen across any table in the database, have to be captured in a table called "Audit_Trail", where we have the below columns in the audit trail tables.
Server_Name
AT_date
AT_time
Table_name
Column_name
Action
Old_value
New_Value
The server on which table, on which column, on which date and time need to be captured. Also, the "Action" column tracks whether an action is an insert, update or delete and we have to capture the old value and new value as well.
So what is the best way to do this? Can we create a database level trigger which can fire trigger in case of any insert, update or delete?
The best way would be to use Oracle's own auditing functionality.
AUDIT ALL ON DEFAULT BY ACCESS;
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/network.112/e36292/auditing.htm#DBSEG392
In response to comment ...
There is nothing unusual in wanting to audit every change made to tables in the database -- hence there is already functionality provided in the system for doing exactly that. It is better then using triggers because it cannot be bypassed as easily. However, if you want to use this pre-supplied, robust, simple to use functionality you might have to compromise on your specific requirements a little, but the payoff will be a superior solution that will use code and configuration in common with thousands of other Oracle systems.

SQL Delete taking too long

We have a table(say T1) that is referenced by about 16 other tables with foreign keys in our SQL Server database. The data is accessed through an ASP.NET application with LINQToSQL. When the user tried to delete a record from T1 the statement would time out. So we decided to first delete the records from the tables that reference T1 and only then delete the record in T1. The problem is that deletion from T1 does not work as fast as expected.
My question is: is it normal that deletion from a table referenced by many other tables to be so time-consuming even if the record itself does not have any 'children' records?
EDIT: Apparently the cause for the timeout was not the delete itself but another query that retrieved data from the same DataContext. Thank you for your suggestions, I have marked as answer the suggestion to add indexes for all foreign keys because it improved our script's execution plan.
I suspect that you may need to look into the indexing on your child tables.
It sounds as if you FKs are set to Cascade Deletes, so I would suspect that some of your tables do not have an index that includes the key to the parent as the first in the index.
In this way your delete will be full scanning the child tables - even if you've already deleted the child records it will still check as you've still got the Cascade set.
When you define a relationship in DB, you can set the Delete rule as Cascade in SQL server. In this way, when you delete the record from the parent table, it will be automatically deleted from the child tables.
Please see the image below:
If it taking long time, you may have set other constraint that will slow
down the process of deletion.
Linq does not do bulk deletes if you're having it operate directly on the record set -- instead, it is probably deleting one record at a time.
To improve performance, use a stored procedure instead for any bulk insert, update or delete operations.

Handling Constraint SqlException in Asp.net

Suppose I have a user table that creates strong relationships (Enforce Foreign Key Constraint) with many additional tables. Such orders table ..
If we try to delete a user with some orders then SqlException will arise.. How can I catch this exception and treat it properly?
Is this strategy at all?
1) first try the delete action if an exception Occur handel it?
2) Or maybe before the delete action using code adapted to ensure that offspring records throughout the database and alert according to .. This piece of work ...
So how to do it?
--Edit:
The goal is not to delete the records from the db! the goal is to inform the user that this record has referencing records. do i need to let sql to execute the delete command and try to catch SqlException? And if so, how to detect that is REFERENCE constraint SqlException?
Or - should I need to write some code that will detect if there are referencing records before the delete command. The last approach give me more but its a lot of pain to implement this kind of verification to each entity..
Thanks
Do you even really want to actually delete User records? Instead I'd suggest having a "deleted" flag in your database, so when you "delete" a user through the UI, all it does is update that record to set the flag to 1. After all, you wouldn't want to delete users that had orders etc.
Then, you just need to support this flag in the appropriate areas (i.e. don't show "deleted" users in the UI).
Edit:
"...but just for the concept, assume that i do want delete the user how do i do that?"
You'd need to delete the records from the other tables that reference that user first, before deleting the user record (i.e. delete the referencing records first then delete the referenced records). But to me that doesn't make sense as you would be deleting e.g. order data.
Edit 2:
"And if so, how to detect that is REFERENCE constraint SqlException?"
To detect this specific error, you can just check the SqlException.Number - I think for this error, you need to check for 547 (this is the error number on SQL 2005). Alternatively, if using SQL 2005 and above, you could handle this error entirely within SQL using the TRY...CATCH support:
BEGIN TRY
DELETE FROM User WHERE UserId = #MyUserId
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
IF (ERROR_NUMBER() = 547)
BEGIN
-- Foreign key constraint violation. Handle as you wish
END
END CATCH
However, I'd personally perform a pre-check like you suggested though, to save the exception. It's easily done using an EXISTS check like this:
IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM [Orders] WHERE UserId=#YourUserId)
BEGIN
-- User is not referenced
END
If there are more tables that reference a User, then you'd need to also include those in the check.

How to find out which package/procedure is updating a table?

I would like to find out if it is possible to find out which package or procedure in a package is updating a table?
Due to a certain project being handed over (the person who handed over the project has since left) without proper documentation, data that we know we have updated always go back to some strange source point.
We are guessing that this could be a database job or scheduler that is running the update command without our knowledge. I am hoping that there is a way to find out where the source code is calling from that is updating the table and inserting the source as a trigger on that table that we are monitoring.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
UPDATE: I poked around and found out
how to trace a statement back to its
owning PL/SQL object.
In combination with what Tony mentioned, you can create a logging table and a trigger that looks like this:
CREATE TABLE statement_tracker
( SID NUMBER
, serial# NUMBER
, date_run DATE
, program VARCHAR2(48) null
, module VARCHAR2(48) null
, machine VARCHAR2(64) null
, osuser VARCHAR2(30) null
, sql_text CLOB null
, program_id number
);
CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER smb_t_t
AFTER UPDATE
ON smb_test
BEGIN
INSERT
INTO statement_tracker
SELECT ss.SID
, ss.serial#
, sysdate
, ss.program
, ss.module
, ss.machine
, ss.osuser
, sq.sql_fulltext
, sq.program_id
FROM v$session ss
, v$sql sq
WHERE ss.sql_address = sq.address
AND ss.SID = USERENV('sid');
END;
/
In order for the trigger above to compile, you'll need to grant the owner of the trigger these permissions, when logged in as the SYS user:
grant select on V_$SESSION to <user>;
grant select on V_$SQL to <user>;
You will likely want to protect the insert statement in the trigger with some condition that only makes it log when the the change you're interested in is occurring - on my test server this statement runs rather slowly (1 second), so I wouldn't want to be logging all these updates. Of course, in that case, you'd need to change the trigger to be a row-level one so that you could inspect the :new or :old values. If you are really concerned about the overhead of the select, you can change it to not join against v$sql, and instead just save the SQL_ADDRESS column, then schedule a job with DBMS_JOB to go off and update the sql_text column with a second update statement, thereby offloading the update into another session and not blocking your original update.
Unfortunately, this will only tell you half the story. The statement you're going to see logged is going to be the most proximal statement - in this case, an update - even if the original statement executed by the process that initiated it is a stored procedure. This is where the program_id column comes in. If the update statement is part of a procedure or trigger, program_id will point to the object_id of the code in question - you can resolve it thusly:
SELECT * FROM all_objects where object_id = <program_id>;
In the case when the update statement was executed directly from the client, I don't know what program_id represents, but you wouldn't need it - you'd have the name of the executable in the "program" column of statement_tracker. If the update was executed from an anonymous PL/SQL block, I'm not how to track it back - you'll need to experiment further.
It may be, though, that the osuser/machine/program/module information may be enough to get you pointed in the right direction.
If it is a scheduled database job then you can find out what scheduled database jobs exist and look into what they do. Other things you can do are:
look at the dependencies views e.g. ALL_DEPENDENCIES to see what packages/triggers etc. use that table. Depending on the size of your system that may return a lot of objects to trawl through.
Search all the database source code for references to the table like this:
select distinct type, name
from all_source
where lower(text) like lower('%mytable%');
Again that may return a lot of objects, and of course there will be some "false positives" where the search string appears but isn't actually a reference to that table. You could even try something more specific like:
select distinct type, name
from all_source
where lower(text) like lower('%insert into mytable%');
but of course that would miss cases where the command was formatted differently.
Additionally, could there be SQL scripts being run through "cron" jobs on the server?
Just write an "after update" trigger and, in this trigger, log the results of "DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_CALL_STACK" in a dedicated table.
The purpose of this function is exactly to give you the complete call stack of al the stored procedures and triggers that have been fired to reach your code.
I am writing from the mobile app, so i can't give you more detailed examples, but if you google for it you'll find many of them.
A quick and dirty option if you're working locally, and are only interested in the first thing that's altering the data, is to throw an error in the trigger instead of logging. That way, you get the usual stack trace and it's a lot less typing and you don't need to create a new table:
AFTER UPDATE ON table_of_interest
BEGIN
RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR(-20001, 'something changed it');
END;
/

How to Get Last Created Entry's ID From Sql Database With Asp.Net

I will explain problem with an example:
There is two table in my database, named entry, tags
There is a column named ID_ENTRY in both table. When I add a record to table, entry, I have to take the ID_ENTRY of last added record and add it to table, tags. How can I do it?
The only way to do this is with multiple statements. Using dynamic sql you can do this by separating each statement in your query string with a semi-colon:
"DECLARE #ID int;INSERT INTO [Entry] (...) VALUES ...; SELECT #ID = scope_identity();INSERT INTO [TAGS] (ID_ENTRY) VALUES (#ID);"
Make sure you put this in a transaction to protect against concurrency problems and keep it all atomic. You could also break that up into two separate queries to return the new ID value in the middle if you want; just make sure both queries are in the same transaction.
Also: you are using parameterized queries with your dynamic sql, right? If you're not, I'll personally come over there and smack you 10,000 times with a wet noodle until you repent of your insecure ways.
Immediatly after executing the insert statement on first table, you should query ##IDENTITY doing "SELECT ##identity". That will retrieve the last autogenerated ID... and then just insert it on the second table.
If you are using triggers or something that inserts rows... this may be not work. Use Scope_Identity() instead of ##IDENTITY
I would probably do this with an INSERT trigger on the named entry table, if you have all of the data you need to push to the tags table available. If not, then you might want to consider using a stored procedure that creates both inside a transaction.
If you want to do it in code, you'll need to be more specific about how you are managing your data. Are you using DataAdapter, DataTables, LINQ, NHibernate, ...? Essentially, you need to wrap both inserts inside a transaction of some sort so that either inserts get executed or neither do, but the means to doing that depend on what technology you are using to interact with the database.
If you use dynamic sql, why not use Linq to Entity Framework, now EF is the recommend data access technology from Microsoft (see this post Clarifying the message on L2S Futures from ADO.NET team blog), and if you do an insert with EF the last identity id will available for you automatically, I use it all the time it's easy.
Hope this helps!
Ray.

Resources