Kirk,
Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I will look into JMS. In my current approach, the process of sending the mail is time consuming.I'm concerned that sending an email to 1000's of recipients from my application (using JMS, Thread etc) would clog my application server (OC4J) and slow down its operation, which is why I was wondering if it could be done at the backend-Oracle 9i.
No doubt, there's a way to do it using PL/SQL or some type of server-side Java in O9i, but then we're getting so far OT that I wouldn't have the first idea on how you would do that.
But using something like JMS would actually allow much better scalability on your application as a whole:
1) The DB is usually the most overloaded part of a major application, and your DBAs will probably be MOST unhappy if they find out you're sending bulk email on your database server.
2) If you start overloading the database server, the whole application will slow down anyway, as well as any other applications running on the database server. Not such a great idea.
3) The application server tier is much more "naturally" horizontally scalable, meaning it's easier to setup a horizontal cluster of idential application server nodes (either in a true cluster or just as a load-balanced farm).
4) If you really have this one problem (which is that this one task is really computational), JMS is the way to go, because you can setup a separate application server instance with ONLY that queue processing ocurring on it and thus offload all the work from the rest of the system.
#4 is the kicker with the JMS approach. In essence you're creating a mail server (har har) which only does this one task.
But I think that Brice has the right idea here: it sounds like what you really need is a better email server. There's no excuse for a mail server that isn't horribly overburdened or remote taking a long time to respond to a large batch email like this. If yours is (perhaps because you're using your corporate email server as a bulk SMTP gateway), ask your IT staff if you can setup a postfix (my favorite for this stuff) or sendmail system on a cheap Linux box to do SMTP gateway for you, because they'll handle this without even a murmur.
Kirk Wylie M7 Corporation
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