ora-01555

Oracle - How does transaction, rollback segment and the undo_retention parameter work ?

I'm no DBA, and I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding Oracle's transaction management process. From what I understood by reading some reliable-looking pages on the Internet (most notably this AskTom note -- but don't bother with the comments), when a transaction is commited, the new data is not reported on the actual data block ...

Can I substitute savepoints for starting new transactions in Oracle?

Right now the process that we're using for inserting sets of records is something like this: (and note that "set of records" means something like a person's record along with their addresses, phone numbers, or any other joined tables). Start a transaction. Insert a set of records that are related. Commit if everything was successful, ...