While it is unlikely in normal operation, there is a possibility that a process that has read-only access to a database file may fail because it cannot acquire enough cache space to do its work. Because it does not have authority to write to the database, such a process cannot flush modified cache records to disk: it must rely on updating processes to keep the number of modified records down to a point that permits read-only access to the database to proceed successfully. However, if updating processes exit in a fashion that does not permit them to flush out modified records, the read-only process (particularly one doing a large transaction) may fail because the cache cannot supply enough blocks. This condition can be cleared by a DSE BUFFER command in the affected region(s).