Re: agenda and goals

[Mark Little <mcl@arjuna.com>]

For #1:
I would like to distinguish two different aspects of the models.. one is the commit protocol aspect and the other is the resource consistency aspect. Thus those entities/actors (initiator, transaction manager, participants, operation, group, (trans)action etc.) that are involved in the model and their roles should be clarified.

Agreed. However, we definitely need to agree on terminology as well. If we keep talking about transactions in the area of weaking ACID-ity we're going to get into a mess. Transactions == ACID in the literature and to many users, so we shouldn't use the same word to describe something that is not ACID. Hopefully we'll resolve that tomorrow.

While with commit protocol we can concentrate on (without too much reference to consistency aspect) what commit protocol(2PC, 3PC, flexible-user-defined etc.) and how it works, with resource consistency aspect we can go into details of how the consistency preserved (it might be a predefined consistency rules/constrainers or user defined consistency) for given entity (group, action etc.), what properties for what entity are needed to achieve it etc.

Yes, but perhaps this comes down to terminology as well. What's a "user"? Even in the transaction domain Consistency is application specific.

 

Mark.

 

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Dr. Mark Little (mark@arjuna.com)
Transactions Architect, HP Arjuna Labs
Phone +44 191 2064538
Fax   +44 191 2064203