Does a DDL in Oracle affect other transactions? I understand that DDL statements in Oracle have an implicit commit before and after the statement, which obviously affects the current transaction.

However, does a DDL statement in any way affect other transactions running against that table (assuming the change is compatible with the DML running against the table)?

For example, if I decide to modify a varchar2(10) columnn to varchar2(20), or add a new column altogether, or drop an obsolete, no longer used column -- are other transactions going to be happy about it, or is there going to be any sort of contention or interruption of running transactions?
This article explains how DDL statements work and how they need exclusive table locks, which plays out nicely when there are transactions running against the table. To summarize:

If the table cannot be locked due to another transaction having a lock on the table

ORA-00054: resource busy and acquire with NOWAIT specified or timeout expired


would be thrown. If the DDL manages to acquire the lock, obviously, any other transaction will block at the point where it needs a lock on the table, until the DDL finishes.

Additionally, since 11g, it is possible to enqueue DDL statements in FIFO order with other statements to get a lock on a table:

declare
begin
      -- We really want to drop that column and so wait for 1800 seconds.
      execute immediate 'alter session set ddl_lock_timeout=1800';
      execute immediate 'alter table t1 drop column n5 ';
exception
  when others then
     dbms_output.put_line(' No luck ');
     dbms_output.put_line(' SQL code'||sqlcode||','|| 'error '||sqlerrm );
end;
/


In older versions of Oracle, it could be a challenge to perform this task on a heavily used table.