Can Oracle Bulkcopy write data within an external transaction?

Question

Hi Everyone,
I am new to odp.net and I hope somebody can help me with an issue about bulkcopy. What I want to do is to make the process of a bulkcopy executed within a transaction. The transaction here should be external and when it comes to the point where bulkcopy is executed, the transation has already begun and has executed some other commands. The way how i want to do this is described as follow
Step 1: Create a connection (e.g. dbConn)
Step 2: Use that connection to start a transaction (e.g. dbConn.BeginTransaction)
Step 3: Use the connection to create and execute some commands (e.g. delete/insert/update some records in a table)
Step 4: Create an OracleBulkCopy instance with that connection (e.g. Dim copier As DBBulkCopy = New OracleBulkCopy(dbConn, OracleBulkCopyOptions.Default) )
Step 5: Use the WriteToServer function in the bulkcopy to copy some data across tables (e.g. copier.writetoserver(datatable))
Step 6: Commit the transaction.
Now when i run to Step 5, the WriteToServer function, an exception is thrown. The error is "ORA-26085: direct path operation must start its own transaction"
As far as I understand, it is telling me the transaction of the connection (dbConn in this example) has begun before the WriteToServer is executed. Howevery, putting the bulkcopy process within an transaction is exactly what I want and it is very critical to the task I am trying to finish.
Can any body let me know how to implement this?
Thanks very much

Answer 1

I see following note in Oracle Data Provider for .NET Developer's Guide 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.7.20) -
"Note: All bulk copy operations are agnostic of any local or distributed transaction created by the application."
Hence it seems that Bulk Copy operations should not be used with user transactions.