Find out if a certain Stored Procedure runs

Question

Hi all,
i have to state that i dont have much oracle specific database knowledge but i've spend half a day now gathering information about a certain problem and didnt find any really working solution.
What i want is to be able to find out if a certain stored procedure is currently running (executing) in the database. I need that to be able to prevent a user of my client application from executing a certain procedure more than once in the same time.
I have found some interesting information about the oracle Call Stack (dbms_utility.format_call_stack) but its not as helpfull as i orginaly thought because as far as i can see it only shows which procedures where executed (and are still executing) while the procedure with the dbms_output.put_line(dbms_utility.format_call_stack) command is executing.
But it doesnt show anything about procedures which are running in another instance of SQL*Plus, for example.
I have no other idea at the moment ...
So i hoped anybody in here maybe has an idea or maybe allready a solution.
But ... thanx in anyway =).
With greetings from germany,
Oliver Bankel

Answer 1

I'm sure there are several solutions.
This is how we solve this problem, not elegant but it works.
We have a table of procs that are running.
Active_Jobs
JOBNAME    VARCHAR2(35)
USERNAME   VARCHAR2(30)
STATUS     VARCHAR2(20)
Then within the proc
job_conflict               EXCEPTION;
BEGIN
select count(1) into v_status from ACTIVE_JOBS
where username = USER and status = 1 ;
if v_status > 1 then
   RAISE JOB_CONFLICT ;
end if;
INSERT INTO ACTIVE_JOBS (JOBNAME, USERNAME, STATUS)
   VALUES ('PROC NAME', USER, 1) ;
COMMIT;
DELETE FROM ACTIVE JOBS WHERE JOBNAME = 'PROC NAME' AND USERNAME = USER ;
COMMIT;
exception
   WHEN job_conflict THEN
     raise_application_error( -20010,'YOUR MESSAGE HERE');
END;