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Subject: ACTION for optimization of registration
ACTION: Mark to write a proposal for the group's consideration to boxcar registrations, given the room's consensus that it appears to be a potentially useful feature. To summarise the issue (http://services.arjuna.com/wscaf-issues/show_bug.cgi?id=55) and the text I am proposing: consider the case of an exporting transaction domain (e.g., one where the transaction coordinator resides or where it was started) making a transactional invocation (one where the context is associated with an application call) to an importing transaction domain. The importing domain will do work that must ultimately be controlled by the transaction outcome and hence needs to register participants (in WS-CF speak that means enlisting participants in the associated activity group). Note, this is not specific to WS-ACID and may be applicable to all of the transaction models we wish to support. In some distributed transaction environments, registration of participants with a remote coordiantor does not occur immediately within the importing domain. Rather, the information about the participants that should have been enlisted is retained within the importing domain until the response to the invocation is sent. In that case, a context is also propagated back with the response and encoded within this context are the EPRs for the participants. The receiver (the original exporting domain) is then responsible for enlisting the participants with the coordinator. The advantage of this approach is that it can improve performance, even if interposition is used: no cross-domain registration invocations are necessary (at least from the importing domain). The disadvantage is the fact that the registration may fail and in which case (assuming failure isn't a transient that can be masked by retries) the exporting domain must either rollback the transaction or somehow communicate with the original importing domain and instruct it to rollback its work. In general, it's safer to require that the entire transaction is rolled back, or at least marked for ultimate roll back. If the response fails to be delivered then the sender may retry or automatically rollback the work that was done. If the sender retries (presumably because it did not receive the response), then the work (including registering of participants) will happen again and unless the importing domain can guarantee idempotent operations (or something akin to retained results), it's safer to require rollback and retry. The important things to remember are that: a) the importing domain (the one that did the work) has participants that have not prepared yet and so, given presumed abort, they can roll back autonomously. b) we don't want split-brain scenario, where the upstream nodes (the exporting domain) takes a different course of action to the downstream nodes in the transaction tree. Although as I've indicated above there are "optimizations" that could be taken in order to negate the necessity of rolling back the entire transaction in the case of registration failure (I'll group failure to deliver the response into this category), it places more work on the implementation/application and can result in non-interoperable/non-portable behaviour. Hence my preference to simply err on the safe side and force roll back. So, here's some proposed text: "A service that receives a transaction context on an application request SHOULD enlist participants with the corresponding activity group. The transaction service implementation associated with the service MAY decide to use the following protocol to optimize remote registration invocations: this optimization MAY occur transparently to the service. Rather than register participants directly, the EPRs of the participants (and the protocols they should be enlisted with) are retained by the service-side transaction service component until the response to the original invocation is sent; in which case a context containing these EPRs and associated data is propagated back with the response. If a receiver of a response obtains this context it MUST either be able to perform the enlistment itself or, if it does not support this optimization, send back a wsacid:CannotOptimizeEnlistment fault code message and mark the transaction so that its only outcome is to rollback. If enlistment fails then the transaction MUST be rolled back; an implementation MAY retry transient registration failures. If the sender of the response receives an indication that there was a non-recoverable failure (e.g., in delivery of the message or registration of the participant EPRs) then it MUST rollback the work it has performed in the scope of that transaction. When using this optimization, the service MUST still see a wscf:participantAdded message in order to be compliant with WS-CF. However, this message SHOULD be generated by the service-side transaction component for this optimization to work." Mark. -- Mark Little Chief Architect Arjuna Technologies Ltd (www.arjuna.com)
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