RAC and instance goes down, transaction state?

Question

I was talking to our physical DBAs, and they told me that when the RAC node you're connected to goes down:
1) if you're mid-query, your process gets transferred to another node
2) if you're not currently running a query, but you are in the middle of a transaction (ie no rollback or commit), that you lose the state of your transaction
I've seen 1) in action, but I haven't heard anything like 2). Is it true? They couldn't remember if they'd read it in the manuals, but they had heard it mentioned on more than 1 occasion during demonstrations.
-Chuck

Answer 1

What version of Oracle?
What kind of Application?
For most of the history of OPS/RAC if you are connected to an instance in the middle of a transaction or not when the instance you are connected to dies you must reconnect. Only if an Oranet fail-over connection was configured could you successfully reconnet asking for the same instance, though you would actually be connected to one of the available instances.
Any work in process was rolled back by another node.
Only with the advent of automatic transaction failover, ATF, would work on the dieing instance transfer to another instance. This works only if the application is coded to perform this task and when it first came out only for Select statements.
HTH -- Mark D Powell --