CLI Transaction Managment

We are attempting to build an CLI/DBapi application for which maintains a connection to Online. We are building a server for which services request from a web site. Some of the incoming requests require access to the ONLINE others do not; our intention is to maintain a poll of N dbconnections for which N will be defined in a init file. THis appears to be an efficeint design; however we have run into a implementaion problem. If a request involing a data manipulation occures, the target table becomes locked and only releases when we disconect from online. We have tried this with "auto-commit" on as well as with issueing the commits. Nether appears to be working for us; We have implemented a work-around by disconnecting from online after each request , and re-establishing a connection for each request. Surly we are not implementing the poper sequence of CLI functions calls, any assitance would be helpful. Thanks Ed Zack