International Business Machines Corporation

Martin Mulholland

Amanda Elizabeth Chessell

Kathryn Sarah Warr

John Anthony Beaven

David John Vines

Ian Robinson

Iain Stuart Caldwell Houston

Catherine Susan Griffin

Robert Howard High, Jr

Simon Antony Holdsworth

Gordon Douglas Hutchison

Stephen James Hobson

Jose Emir Garza

Thomas James Freund

Steven Powell

Peter John Schommer

Charlie James Redlin

A method for providing atomicity for a unit of work involving a plurality of participants, the method comprising the steps of: sending a prepare request to at least one participant, wherein the request comprises data required for recovery purposes of the unit of work; and on recovery of the unit of work, recovering the unit of work comprising: obtaining the data from the at least one participant; and using the obtained data to recover and preserve the atomicity of the unit of work.

Providing atomicity for a unit of work

Disclosed is apparatus for processing business data processing activities, the apparatus comprising: an activity instance; and a descriptor for the activity instance associated uniquely with the activity instance; wherein the descriptor includes parameters for determining lifecycle behaviors of said activity instance. The descriptor may be programmable to modify the lifecycle behaviors according to a use made of said activity instance. The use of the activity instance may be responsive to a request by a client. It may also be responsive to a request by an activity instance. The descriptor may be programmable to modify the lifecycle behaviors according to a position in a system hierarchy of the activity instance.

Data processing activity lifecycle control

Disclosed is data processing apparatus comprising: means for receiving inputs indicative of results from one or more participants of said one or more sets of data processing tasks; means for mapping each of said inputs to a corresponding mapped value by accessing a mapping table; outcome processor means for accepting the mapped values as inputs and determining an outcome for said one or more sets of data processing tasks; and means, responsive to said means for determining, for transmitting an indicator of said outcome to said one or more participants; wherein the inputs and mapped values of the mapping table are programmably changeable to thus provide a high degree of flexibility with respect to said inputs.

Replaceable outcome decider

A server processing method for use in a client/server computing system which carries out transactions, has steps of: receiving a command instructing the server to carry out a step of a transaction; beginning the transaction; and determining whether a predetermined triggering event has occurred during the carrying out of the transaction, and only if the triggering event has occurred, creating a means for coordinating the transaction with respect to a plurality of elements that are involved in carrying out the transaction.

Apparatus, method and computer program product for client/server computing with timing of creation of coordinator transaction state object being based on triggering events

A data processing apparatus has a direct access non-volatile memory storage device having a plurality of extent files for storing log records therein; an allocating unit for allocating a current extent file to be used for storing log records; a writing unit for writing log records into the current extent file until the current extent file cannot store any further log records; and a key-pointing unit for performing a key-pointing operation on the written log records when the writing unit has reached the point where no further log records can be stored in the current extent file.

Data processing apparatus, method and computer program with optimized key-pointing operation for log record storage

A data processing apparatus ( , FIG. ) has a direct access non-volatile storage device ( ) on which log records are stored in one or more log files. The processor ( ) allocates storage for the log based on possible future requirements. The processor sets the maximum amount of new data that can be written to the log before a key-point operation is performed. When the maximum is reached a key-point is performed. As a result the maximum possible size of the active data written as part of the next key-point can be calculated and storage is allocated accordingly. Should storage become restricted such that the required storage cannot be allocated the data processing apparatus runs in a restricted mode during which the records that are written to the log are concerned with reducing the size of the active data and therefore the next key-point. In transaction processing this is achieved by: not starting new transactions; not allowing transactions to involve new participants; and only allowing transactions to complete.

Log storage management in a data processing system using key-pointing

A data processing apparatus for carrying out a specific business logic data processing task, has a plurality of business activities running on at least one data processing machine, each activity communicates with other activities via a communications protocol in order to carry out the specific business logic data processing task. At least one of the activities includes a plurality of message broker data processing nodes.

Data processing with message processing nodes wrapped into a business activity

A server processing method for use in a client/server computing system which carries out transactions, includes steps of: receiving a command from a client process to signify the beginning of a transaction; determining whether a local transaction creator exists; and forwarding on the command to another server if a local transaction creator does not exist and for locally creating transaction state data if a local transaction creator does exist.

Apparatus, method and computer program product for client/server computing with the ability to select which servers are capable of creating transaction state data

A client processing apparatus for use in a client/server computing system which carries out transactions, issues a begin command to signify the beginning of a transaction; sends a substantive transactional command to a remote server, said command including a transaction context having a specific value which indicates that a transaction has been started but transaction objects which represent the transaction have not yet been created; and receives a modified transaction context from said remote server once said remote server has created said transaction objects.

Apparatus, method and computer program product for client/server computing with intelligent location of transaction objects

A server in a client/server computing system where a distributed transaction is being carried out, has: a server resource having local data associated therewith; a software element for receiving a registration request from the server resource requesting that the server resource be registered in a transaction, after the server resource has received the transaction context in the explicit transaction propagation mode; and a software element for creating a distributed transaction object representing the transaction in response to receipt of the registration request, the distributed transaction object persisting until the transaction is completed.

Apparatus, method and computer program product for client/server

Client/server middleware processes a source code client application program so that when the application program signifies the beginning of a transaction using a transaction begin command, the transaction is automatically created locally for a recoverable client and remotely for a non-recoverable client. The source code client application program can thus be written without regard to whether the transaction will be created locally or remotely, the middleware takes care of this function.

Method and a computer program product for client/server computing with

In brief, an object oriented thread context manager, a method and computer program product are provided for object oriented thread context management, particularly for relational databases working with distributed transactions. A context manager is provided for managing a plurality of ContextControl objects. Each ContextControl object comprises a plurality of methods for creating, resuming and suspending context on a thread for a target object. A ContextCoordinator class is provided for managing calls to the plurality of ContextControl objects. A ContextHandleList is provided for storing context information for the ContextControl objects. A specialized ContextCoordinator is provided for managing calls to a specialized ones of the ContextControl objects. A DatabaseContextCoordinator is an example of the specialized ContextCoordinator. The specialized ones of the ContextControl objects are registered and unregistered with the ContextCoordinator class and then registered DatabaseContextCoordinator.

Growing community of inventors

Winchester, United Kingdom

Martin Mulholland