I am faced with a peculiar requirement which is as follows:  

A network-intensive operation is triggered to a server by multiple clients, through a web-interface. However, only one operation is allowed at a time, and hence an entry(tuple) is made in an SQL table to indicate that the operation is in progress. Once the operation is complete (irrespective of success or failure), the appropriate result is displayed back to the client(s), and the corresponding tuple is removed from the SQL table.  

Since the operation is network-intensive, a scenario where the operation needs to be "considered" to be cancelled, after some timeout (10 minutes) has to be introduced.  

**Is there ANY way the lifetime of a row in SQL be associated with a timeout value, so that is is deleted after certain time?** My application is primarily written in Java 1.5 and EJB 3.0, using JPA/Hibernate to access Oracle 10g DB engine.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,  

Nagendra U M