Inconsistent Locking with Select for Update

Hi,
I seem to be having some issues in using SELECT FOR UPDATE and was hoping to get some insight from the Oralce Guru's out there.
I have a J2EE application, running in WebLogic 8.1.4 using Oralce 9.2.0.1.0.
The application contains code that requires locking to be done on a specific table with multiple transactions (tx) requesting the same lock. Eg:
Tx 1: Select * from Zone where Zoneid = 'Zone1' for update (Obtains lock)
Tx 2: Select * from Zone where Zoneid = 'Zone1' for update (waits)
Tx 100: Select * from Zone where Zoneid = 'Zone1' for update
Tx1 commits.
It appears that the following transactions, i.e. Tx2 - Tx100 do not seem to execute in the order the lock was requested. That is Tx 100 always appears to be the second last transaction to execute, after which some arbitrary transaction between Tx2 - Tx99 will execute after Tx100 has committed.
This seems to tell me that the lock is not being handed in a FIFO manner and is causing us great pain as our data is not longer consistent.
Does anyone know how i might be able to trace which transaction is being awarded the lock? Also if anyone has any suggestion on how to troubleshoot/solve this issue, greatly appreciated.
TIA
Prem

Oracle does not have a lock queue/manager at all. The locked status of a record is essentially an attribute of the record itself. It is stored on the datablock header. When a transaction requests a lock and can't get it, and is willing to wait (SELECT FOR UPDATE without NOWAIT), it first spins while waiting for the lock (four times as I recall), then sleeps waiting for the lock. The the more times it sleeps before getting the lock, the longer it will sleep before trying again.
What is likely happening here is that transaction 100 is still spinning when transaction 1 commits, so checks back more frequently and gets the lock first. The rest get the lock whenever they wake up and noone else has taken the lock.
If you need the transaction to occur in order, then I do not think you can use Oracle's native locking mechanism. Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, you may want to look at Advanced Queueing, or possibly the built-in package DBMS_LOCK.
HTH
John

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null

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Bjorn Engsig ([email protected]):
Are you saying, that the memory leak disappears if you don't do 'for update' in the query?
Also, is the memory leak on the client or server side?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
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null

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Inconsistent Locking with Select for Update

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