[storm] storm-oracle support

[Jason Baker]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer<gustavo at niemeyer.net> wrote:
> Thanks for nicely separating the several bits in their own tickets.
> We'll have a run over them on the way to the next stable release.
> Hopefully we can get to merge the full oracle support by then.

I've been testing some of the Oracle support branch and I've uploaded
the changes to our branch at lp:~zeomega/storm/zeomega_storm.  I was
going to submit these changes over to Drew's branch (I believe that's
lp:~djfroofy/storm/oracle-support-patches), but it turns out that
we're using a different version of trunk, so that may be non-trivial.
The changes are mainly:

 * Support for TNS names
 * Oracle Connection sends a register-transaction event on execute
 * Some miscellaneous changes to unit tests.

However, one thing that may be problematic:  I read in a comment[1]
that Storm relies on SERIALIZABLE isolation.  My understanding is that
Oracle works best 90% of the time when run in READ COMMITTED mode.  In
fact, I'm having trouble getting tests to pass in SERIALIZABLE mode.
How do we deal with this?

At any rate, I still need to work on getting all of the tests to pass
(we're at 443/456 as of now), but is there anything I can be doing now
to make merging these three branches any easier?

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/storm/+bug/371806/comments/2