UTL_TCP connection timeout in Oracle 8i

Question

I am using Oracle 8i’s UTL_TCP package for sending and receiving messages on TCP. When I enter invalid port it waits for long time before throwing error.
There is a provision of tx_timeout parameter in oracle 9i in UTL_TCP.open_connection. But there is no such parameter in Oracle 8i. How to deal with this problem in Oracle 8i?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,
This is how I dealt with it. In 8i the available function tells you how many bytes are available immediately, without blocking. Simply execute a loop, exiting when available returns more than 0. If available returns 0, simply sleep for a while using dbms_lock.sleep (the smallest unit of time you can sleep for is roughly 1/10th of a second using this method). Rough pseudo code is at the end.
It's a bit clunky, but worked well enough to emulate the timeout functionality for me to put in my xutl_ftp package.
HTH
Chris
while seconds_elapsed < 2 loop
  if available(c) > 0 then
    exit;
  else
    dbms_lock.sleep(1/10);
    seconds_elapsed := seconds_elapsed + (1/10);
  end if;
end loop;