Question

I’m running into an open cursor limit issue with using the following code. The open cursor limit on the oracle db is set to around 1000. The following code seems to hold onto the cursors even though I’ve got everything in a using statement (I think) that requires it. (Note, I don’t need to read anything from outRefCursor2)

Am I missing a using or some other clean up with ODP.net?
The exception occurs consistently at iteration 596.

static List<Thing> GetDetailsForItems(List<string> items) {
  DateTime start = DateTime.UtcNow;
  var things = new List<Thing>();
  var spname = "SP_GET_THING_DETAILS";
  var outRefCursorName1 = "p_ref_cursor1";
  var outRefCursorName2 = "p_ref_cursor2";

  // Create params
  var pInput1 = new OracleParameter("p_input1",
                  OracleDbType.Varchar2, ParameterDirection.Input);
  pInput1.Value = "";
  // Input 2 can be blank
  var pInput2 = new OracleParameter("p_input2",
                  OracleDbType.Varchar2, ParameterDirection.Input);
  pInput2.Value = "";

  var outRefCursor1 = new OracleParameter(outRefCursorName1,
                  OracleDbType.RefCursor, ParameterDirection.Output);
  var outRefCursor2 = new OracleParameter(outRefCursorName2,
                  OracleDbType.RefCursor, ParameterDirection.Output);

  int count = 0;
  using (var conn = new OracleConnection(CONN_STR)) {
    conn.Open();
    using (var cmd = conn.CreateCommand()) {
      cmd.Parameters.Add(pInput1);
      cmd.Parameters.Add(pInput2);
      cmd.Parameters.Add(outRefCursor1);
      cmd.Parameters.Add(outRefCursor2);
      cmd.CommandText = spname;
      cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
      foreach (string value in items) {
        count++; 
        cmd.Parameters[pInput1.ParameterName].Value = value;
        var execVal = cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
        using (var refCursor = (Types.OracleRefCursor)
                                cmd.Parameters[outRefCursorName1].Value) {
          using (var reader = refCursor.GetDataReader()) {
            while (reader.Read()) {
              // read columns
              things.Add(reader["COLUMN_A"].ToString());
            }
          } // close reader
        } // close cursor
      } // end foreach
    } // close command
  } // close connection           
  int seconds = (DateTime.UtcNow - start).Seconds;
  Console.WriteLine("Finished in {0} seconds", seconds);
  return things;
}

I’m using this snippet found online to monitor DB cursors. I can watch the cursors add up while stepping through the code. And they just keep adding at the cmd.ExecuteNonQuery() line. I never see a drop after any using statement closes.

select sum(a.value) total_cur, avg(a.value) avg_cur, max(a.value) max_cur, 
s.username, s.machine
from v$sesstat a, v$statname b, v$session s 
where a.statistic# = b.statistic#  and s.sid=a.sid
and b.name = 'opened cursors current'
and machine='MY COMPUTER' 
group by s.username, s.machine
order by 1 desc;

Answer 1

None of the suggestions had worked thus far. So in desperation, I ended up force GC collection every 200 iterations. With the following code.

if (count % 200 == 0) {
    GC.Collect();
}

What’s strange is that when calling this method from a unit test, the manual GC.Collect() does not release any cursors. But when calling the method from the business layer, it actually does work and I can see the open cursors get released by monitoring the oracle DB.