Oracle Internals: An Introduction

Chapter 3. Latches

There are numerous data structures in Oracle’s System Global Area (SGA) that need to be accessed concurrently by many different database processes. It is essential that only one process be able to modify any particular data structure at one time, and that the data structure cannot be modified while it is being inspected. Oracle makes sure this does not happen by protecting all SGA data structures with either locks or latches. (See Chapter 6, for a description of the contents of the SGA and other memory areas.)

Latches and Locks

Latches are the more restrictive mechanism, because they do not allow multiple processes to inspect the protected data structure at the same time—they provide for exclusive access only.^[1] Locks allow for better concurrency, because they may be held in a shared mode when the data structure is simply being inspected.

Another significant difference between locks and latches is request queuing. Requests for locks are queued if necessary and serviced in order, whereas latches do not support request queuing. If a request to get a latch fails because the latch is busy, the process just continues to retry until it succeeds. So latch requests are not necessarily serviced in order.

Because a latch can only be held by one process at a time, and because there is no inherent concept of queuing, the latch data structure itself is very simple—essentially just a single location in memory representing the state of the latch. And because the latch data structure ...