locking and database link

Last week-end a new release went to production. This week we got plenty of ORA-2049. What in the hell went wrong? And why did not we find out this locking before?

We just did not have that concurrency effect in test.

How does locking work ?

With regular tables:
session 1
select * from lsc_t for update;
session 2
update lsc_t set id=3;

Session 2 waits until transaction in session 1 finishes.

But in case the update is using a subquery that access a remote table, the update will fail after 1 minute

session 1
select * from lsc_t for update;
session 2
update lsc_t set x=(select * from lsc_t@db02);
Session 2 will end with ORA-02049: timeout: distributed transaction waiting for lock

The timeout of one minute is defined by distributed_lock_timeout, and it is not modifiable in your session (chances are, you will not be able to modify this parameter).