Choosing whether to use discrete transactions should be a part of your normal tuning procedure. Although discrete transactions can only be used for a subset of all transactions, for sophisticated users with advanced application requirements, where speed is the most critical factor, the performance improvements can make working within the design constraints worthwhile. How Discrete Transactions Work During a discrete transaction, all changes made to any data are deferred until the transaction commits. Redo information is generated, but is stored in a separate location in memory. The block is written to the database file in the usual manner.
Control is returned to the application once the commit completes.
This eliminates the need to generate undo information since the block is not actually modified until the transaction is committed, and the redo information is stored in the redo log buffers. As with other transactions, the uncommitted changes of a discrete transaction are not visible to concurrent transactions. For regular transactions, undo information is used to re-create old versions of data for queries that require a consistent view of the data. For this reason, you might want to avoid performing queries that access a large subset of a table that is modified by frequent discrete transactions. See Oracle7 Server Reference for more information about setting initialization parameters.