1 Introduction to Workspace Manager

Oracle Workspace Manager, often referred to as Workspace Manager, provides an infrastructure that enables applications to create workspaces and group different versions of table row values in different workspaces.

Users are permitted to create new versions of data to update, while maintaining a copy of the old data. The ongoing results of the activity are stored persistently, assuring concurrency and consistency.

Applications that can benefit from Workspace Manager typically do one or more of the following operations:

  • Manage a collection of updates and insertions as a unit before incorporating them into production data

    You can review changes and roll back undesirable ones before making the changes public. Until you make the changes public, they are invisible to other users of the database, who will access only the regular production data. You can organize the changes in a simple set of workspaces or in a complex workspace hierarchy. A typical example might be a life sciences application in which Workspace Manager supports the discovery and quality assurance (QA) processes by managing a collection of updates before they are merged with the production data.

  • Support a collaborative development effort

    A team can share access to a collection of updates and insertions for a collaborative project. Workspace privileges control access to a workspace and its operations, and you can restrict workspace access to single-writer, read-only, or no access. Workspace locks prevent update conflicts between projects in separate workspaces. A typical example might be an application to design an engineering project, in which multiple subprojects are concurrently developed in separate workspaces.

  • Use a common data set to create multiple scenarios for what-if analyses or multiple editions of data for publication

    You can organize changes in workspaces to view them in the context of the whole database, but without requiring that you actually copy data between tables. Different users can make simultaneous changes to the same row, and you can detect and resolve conflicts. A typical example might be a telecommunications application in which you create multiple cell phone coverage scenarios to find the optimal design.

  • Keep a history of changes to data

    You can navigate workspaces and row versions to view the database as of a particular milestone or point in time. You can roll back changes to a row or table in a workspace to a milestone. A typical example might be a land information management application where Workspace Manager supports regulatory requirements by maintaining a history of all changes to land parcels.

Workspace Manager is also useful in managing long-transaction scenarios, where complex, long-duration database transactions can take days to complete, and multiple users must access the same database.

This chapter explains concepts and operations that you must understand to use Workspace Manager. For complete examples of Workspace Manager, see Simplified Examples Using Workspace Manager. However, you may want to read the rest of this chapter first, to understand the concepts that the examples illustrate.

Note:

Workspace Manager is installed by default in the Oracle seed database and any database created using the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA). To use Workspace Manager in any other Oracle database, you must first perform the installation procedure described in Installing Workspace Manager with Custom Databases.

Parent topic: Conceptual and Usage Information