Peter wrote:

>been run on Oracle before - apparantly without discovering that Oracle
>commits no-matter-what after a DDL statement.

And before, too!

You might not notice the problem if no other users happen to be looking
at the half-committed data, or unless you try to rollback.

The autonomous transaction Brian mentioned is one way around this...
but still has pros and cons:
http://asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/autonomous/index.html

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
Since she's sorority she still seriously studies stats$sysstat so some
silly short-sighted scientist sometimes softly sighs "shared sort
segments."