I have an Oracle DB package that is routinely causing what I believe is an ITL (Interested Transaction List) deadlock. The relevant portion of a trace file is below.
Deadlock graph:
---------Blocker(s)-------- ---------Waiter(s)---------
Resource Name process session holds waits process session holds waits
TM-0000cb52-00000000 22 131 S 23 143 SS
TM-0000ceec-00000000 23 143 SX 32 138 SX SSX
TM-0000cb52-00000000 30 138 SX 22 131 S
session 131: DID 0001-0016-00000D1C session 143: DID 0001-0017-000055D5
session 143: DID 0001-0017-000055D5 session 138: DID 0001-001E-000067A0
session 138: DID 0001-001E-000067A0 session 131: DID 0001-0016-00000D1C
Rows waited on:
Session 143: no row
Session 138: no row
Session 131: no row
There are no bit-map indexes on this table, so that's not the cause. As far as I can tell, the lack of "Rows waited on" plus the "S" in the Waiter waits column likely indicates that this is an ITL deadlock. Also, the table is written to quite often (roughly 8 insert or updates concurrently, as often as 240 times a minute), so and ITL deadlock seems like a strong possibility.
I've increased the INITRANS parameter of the table and it's indexes to 100 and increased the PCT_FREE on the table from 10 to 20 (then rebuilt the indexes), but the deadlocks are still occurring. The deadlock seems to happen most often during an update, but that could just be a coincidence, as I've only traced it a couple of times.
My questions are two-fold:
1) Is this actually an ITL deadlock?
2) If it is an ITL deadlock, what else can be done to avoid it?
Cross-posted from Stack Overflow. Deadlocks are normally a programming problem, but ITL deadlocks relate directly to how Oracle writes to disk, so this may be an area where DBAs have more experience.
