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Subject: Re: [ebxml-msg] reliable messaging
Chris, Yes, as I told Komal, the message status services seems to be just what is needed. However, its presence is not enough. Reliable Messaging has its own interoperability matters and prescribing the use of the message status service along with prescribing minimal state to be persisted is still necessary. Of course, it's impossible to close the loop completely. However, people who view that the important reason for reliable messaging is to cover (most) cases of system failure and recovery view absence of system failure coverage as a major omission. Identifying and stating the known limitations is also part of a specification writer's responsibilities. Regards, Marty ************************************************************************************* Martin W. Sachs IBM T. J. Watson Research Center P. O. B. 704 Yorktown Hts, NY 10598 914-784-7287; IBM tie line 863-7287 Notes address: Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM Internet address: mwsachs @ us.ibm.com ************************************************************************************* Christopher B Ferris To: Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM@IBMUS cc: ebxml-msg@lists.oasis-open.org 10/14/2002 12:27 Subject: Re: [ebxml-msg] reliable messaging(Document link: Martin W. Sachs) PM Marty, ebMS *does* indeed provide such a status query. Granted that its required use in the failure mode you articulate is not specified (it could easily be). I do not believe that the protocol is necessarily broken in this regard, however it could certainly be reinforced and made more clear. I should also point out that no matter how hard one tries, it is impossible to close the loop entirely. If B never recovers, then A and B are permanently and unreconcilably out of synch w/r/t their shared understanding of the state of the exchange. Further comments below. Cheers, Christopher Ferris Architect, Emerging e-business Industry Architecture email: chrisfer@us.ibm.com phone: +1 508 234 3624 Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM@IBMUS wrote on 10/14/2002 11:46:01 AM: > > > > > It has been pointed out to me that ebXML reliable messaging is not reliable > under system failure. At least one person who mentioned it considers ebXML > messaging to be broken as a result. Here is a scenario: > > Party A send a message reliably to Party B. > > Party B's MSH receives and persists the message. > > Party B's MSH attempts to send the reliable-messaging acknowledgment but > Party B's system goes down before the acknowledgment gets on the wire. > > Party A exhausts its retries and concludes that the message was not > delivered. > > Party B eventually comes up and the destination application processes the > persisted message as prescribed in the MSG specification. > > Parties A and B are now out of sync with respect to that transaction and do > not know they are out of sync. Party A believes that the transaction > failed. Party B has in fact processed the message that it received from > Party A. Reliable messaging has failed to deliver on its promise. > > The solution to this problem is not trivial and the MSG team needs to give > it a lot of thought. At a minimum, the following are needed in the spec: > > 1. Both parties to the message exchange MUST persist enough state to allow > recovery and getting back in sync. Specific state variables must be This is already prescribed in the spec. > prescribed. They are at least those variables needed to restore the state > of the transaction and conversation after system recovery, such as the > conversation ID, CPA Id, service, action, and perhaps other parts of the > message header. > > 2. Timeouts and retries, as prescribed in the MSG spec, are not sufficient > to cover system failures since the failure could last a very long time. > Instead, if the party that sent the message doesn't receive a reply in a > reasonable time, it must be able to send a status query to the other party > and keep requesting status periodically until it receives a response. The > status query protocol must be defined in the MSG specification. If the The protocol is defined, see section 7. > appropriate state information is persisted at both ends, when party B comes > up, it will receive and respond properly to the status query. The timeouts > could be retained in the spec but their main use would be to signal the > "attached human" to make a phone call. That is always an option:) > > The MSG team should consider this a work item for version 3. Should the > team not wish to solve this problem, at the very least, a caveat should be > added to the MSG specification that messaging reliability under conditions > of system failure is outside the scope of the MSG team. Again, I believe that much of your concerns are already addressed. There is no doubt in my mind that they could be reinforced, making it abundantly clear to the reader. > > Regards, > Marty > > > > ************************************************************************************* > > Martin W. Sachs > IBM T. J. Watson Research Center > P. O. B. 704 > Yorktown Hts, NY 10598 > 914-784-7287; IBM tie line 863-7287 > Notes address: Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM > Internet address: mwsachs @ us.ibm.com > ************************************************************************************* > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription > manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>
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