Jaweed Saleem wrote:
....
> hmmm.... This would be inconvenient. What about setting the dead
> session expiry times down to 15 seconds. Would this clean the
> disconnected sessions without affecting current connections? what
> would be the downsides of doing this?

If the network connection is unavailable for 15 seconds, the connection will
be lost. All changes will be lost, all running transactions rolled back, all
tables and queries closed, all in-memory tables for that client thrown away,
all locks. That would lead to "interesting" problems with WLAN connections.

> Sorry about being a thicky on this guys. I can't believe that nobody
> else seems to have this kind of problem under client/server

This is simply how C/S works. You have a connection. The server has to
handle the situation where the client a) does not want anything for some
time and b) lost connection for some time. A "classic" C/S db connection is
stateful, the server stores some data about the connection state, the
transactions etc. If you want to overcome all these points, you have to
switch to a stateless system. Eg. a middle tier like kbmMW. There, you can
suspend your computer for a decade, wake it up and work where you where 10
years before.

Ralf