By Peter Holditch  In this column over the years, I have spent a considerable amount of time talking about contention and locking in the database tier. At the end of the day, the endless conversations about scaling the application tier boil down to less than a bag of beans if a scaled application can't g... Feb. 18, 2006 10:30 AM EST Reads: 11,645 Replies: 1 |
By Peter Holditch  I have been knocking around the computer industry for a while now, and I've noticed some changes in my contemporaries and myself... For one thing, the buttons around the stomach of those old shirts that have eluded capture by my wife are looking a bit more strained than they did in the... Jan. 26, 2006 06:45 PM EST Reads: 12,532 Replies: 1 |
By Peter Holditch  'High performance' is what everybody strives for when putting together a new system. Technical folk often spend hours hung up on the raw speed of their code, and a certain machismo can be derived from shaving milliseconds off that pesky transaction that is the latest pride and joy. Oft... Oct. 29, 2005 12:15 PM EDT Reads: 13,956 Replies: 3 |
By Peter Holditch  The value of two phase commit transactions has always been that programmers can write applications that access data spread across multiple databases and be confident that any updates that are made will be consistently reflected in all of the databases, or none, at the end of the transa... Aug. 8, 2005 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 9,466 |
By Peter Holditch  In browsing around the Web, as one occasionally does in a free nanosecond, I read an interesting article about twp-phase commit transactions by Gregor Hohpe of ThoughtWorks ('Your Coffee Shop Does Not Use Two Phase Commit'). Gregor comes at the subject from the direction opposite the o... Jun. 21, 2005 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 9,187 |
By Peter Holditch As I write, the noise level that continues to be generated around open source application servers and their claims to be coming into the world of enterprise computing continues. In my view, the main reason why the noise travels so far and seems so loud has nothing to do with the realit... Feb. 11, 2005 12:00 AM EST Reads: 12,872 |
By Peter Holditch This issue, in an uncharacteristic attempt to fit in with the Zeitgeist, I propose to depart slightly from my well-trodden path to the transaction manager and take a look at frameworks. I expect you can guess which particular framework I am going to take a pass at, too. For nearly as l... Nov. 16, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 12,583 |
By Peter Holditch A realization has dawned across the industry that 'service-oriented architecture' is a good thing. In fact, this is less of a dawning and more of a reawakening. Sep. 10, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 10,872 |
By Peter Holditch As we've discussed over the past few issues, JTA-style transactions provide a way for multiple data updates to be tied together so application logic can operate safely in the assumption that it will succeed or fail consistently, even in the face of technical failures along the road. Jul. 13, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,917 |
By Peter Holditch One definition of a commodity is something that you take for granted. I'll bet there aren't many readers out there who wake in the morning and exclaim, 'Thank goodness there's air in the room to breathe!' Likewise, computer users will seldom give thanks for their operating systems, a p... May. 17, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 14,318 |
By Peter Holditch This month's article is again inspired by a posting on the weblogic.developer.interest.transaction newsgroup. The question (excerpted from the posting) was: Does the 10 in weblogic-ejb-jar.xml apply to transactions that are in a suspended state? Apr. 9, 2004 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 19,907 Replies: 1 |
By Peter Holditch Whatever your innermost feelings about the symbols, and however fondly you remember debugging network infrastructures with nothing more than a LAN sniffer and an uncanny ability to interpret 4k blocks of hex, it is fairly safe to say that Web services are here to stay. With the indust... Mar. 10, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 11,034 |
By Peter Holditch Another discussion based on a weblogic.developer.interest.transaction posting this month. It's a newsgroup that always proves to be a good source of information for the world at large when it comes to transactional behavior (and a good source of inspiration for me when the article time... Feb. 26, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 13,853 |
By Peter Holditch The launch of BEA's WebLogic Platform 8.1 was greeted with enthusiasm by industry analysts and IT practitioners alike, who recognized its potential to open up the power of the J2EE platform to a much broader spectrum of developers. Jan. 9, 2004 12:00 AM EST Reads: 9,769 |
By Peter Holditch The buzz in the industry these days is all about service-oriented architecture. One of the key benefits that this brings is loose coupling between systems, which in turn improves the agility of the overall architecture Dec. 1, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 10,275 |
By Peter Holditch This month's article is again inspired by an interesting design discussion posted on the weblogic.developer.transaction newsgroup. (Ever get the feeling I'm running short of inspiration? Ideas for new articles always welcome!) Nov. 6, 2003 03:24 PM EST Reads: 10,263 |
By Peter Holditch No, don't worry, it's not a a floor-wax/dessert-topping/toothpaste article this month; it's simply a look at how multilanguage application environments might be used together in highly distributed systems. Oct. 3, 2003 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 9,873 |
By Peter Holditch This month I was again inspired by the weblogic.developer.interest.transaction newsgroup on newsgroups.bea.com - if you weren't listening last time I plugged this newsgroup, listen now; one day, it might save your life! Sep. 10, 2003 01:50 PM EDT Reads: 11,117 |
By Peter Holditch In most large-scale 'mission critical' systems, high on the list of requirements is resistance to failure. With the world living in fear of violent destruction post 9/11, it is more common for the definition of 'failure' in this context to be the loss of a whole data-processing facilit... Aug. 7, 2003 01:12 PM EDT Reads: 8,820 |
By Peter Holditch I have a rather deaf and rather elderly grandmother. She is a lovely woman and can spend hours telling tales - sometimes fascinating and sometimes... well, less fascinating - about times past. May. 27, 2003 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,994 |
By Peter Holditch Over the past 16 months - has it really been that long?! - I have attempted to climb the peaks of how to design applications that use transactions, and dived into the depths of the earth, looking at obscure knowledge such as how clients can demarcate transactions, and grubby details o... Apr. 22, 2003 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,614 |
By Peter Holditch I thought I would devote this month's column to a subject that appeared a while ago in the weblogic.developer.interest.transaction newsgroup on newsgroups.bea.com. As an opening comment, if you have never seen these newsgroups and you are a WebLogic developer, then go find them immedia... Mar. 27, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 7,939 |
By Peter Holditch This month, I thought I would take a below-the-surface look at what needs to be done to achieve transactional access to the IBM MQSeries messaging product from WebLogic Server within the context of an Xa transaction managed by WebLogic's JTA subsystem. Of course, from the outset I woul... Jan. 20, 2003 12:00 AM EST Reads: 9,505 |
By Peter Holditch A common complaint in the transaction newsgroup is, 'I've done my database updates in a JTA transaction, but they didn't complete as a unit!' In many cases, the explanation for this unfortunate loss of ACID is that the database connections that were used in the logic weren't o... Dec. 17, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 9,312 |
By Peter Holditch The waves of IT, as they are often called to, are marked out reasonably accurately by languages. Starting almost at the beginning, take COBOL. With its love of uppercase characters, and overly restrictive attitude to what column the uppercase characters appear in - not to mention its ... Nov. 19, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 7,979 |
By Peter Holditch Picnicking during my summer holidays with my family, I was a little peeved to find that we had set up camp near an ant hill and some of them had decided to help themselves to elements of our lunch. Just as well, really, that I prefer sausage rolls and pork pies to chocolate buns, I gue... Oct. 15, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 7,647 |
By Peter Holditch Why are application servers so boring? I guess the answer to this question depends on your perspective. One man's boring commodity is another man's lifeblood. That observation alone would make for a rather short column, so we need another question. Sep. 24, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,490 |
By Peter Holditch As I may have mentioned once or twice in this column over the foregoing months, developers can derive a large amount of value from building their applications on an application server. Aug. 23, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 10,547 |
By Peter Holditch For several months now I've waxed lyrical about transactions and how they hide the complexities of distributed updates in applications, and indeed the concept of the two-phase commit transaction is a very powerful one, allowing you to make the assumption that all the transactional data... Aug. 2, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 7,064 |
By Peter Holditch I've seen several posts in the public WebLogic server transactions newsgroup in which people have had problems with transactions spread across multiple servers. The gist of these problems is always that they have two EJB components in two different servers. Bean One on Server One exec... May. 20, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,282 |
By Peter Holditch That was what an old girlfriend periodically said to me. Needless to say, we're no longer together - I wasn't keen on the comparison. 'Shall I compare thee to a dog?' is rather less poetic than I like. But in thinking about this month's transaction column, the comment seemed strangely... Apr. 17, 2002 12:00 AM EDT Reads: 8,270 |
By Peter Holditch As we've discussed over the past few issues, JTA-style transactions provide a way for multiple data updates to be tied together so application logic can operate safely in the assumption that it will succeed or fail consistently, even in the face of technical failures along the road. Th... Mar. 26, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 7,879 |
By Peter Holditch As I understand Western ideas about the world, there seem to have been three distinct phases through which they have passed. In the beginning, people believed that the world was flat, and at the center of the universe. Eventually, this view was confounded by the likes of Christopher Co... Feb. 20, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 7,287 |
By Peter Holditch Sad, I mused - you don't often see that any more. My mind then wandered to hoping that, as technologists, we aren't somehow tacitly colluding in the erosion of the fabric that holds society together. Hmm, I seem to have come over all melancholy. Excuse me whilst I visit The Hunger Site... Feb. 6, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 10,482 |
By Peter Holditch Since this will be a monthly column on the subject of transactions, which from my experience seems to be a subject that everybody has heard of, but nobody is familiar with, I thought I would build up speed with a back-to-basics look at transactions, what they are and what they're for. Jan. 7, 2002 12:00 AM EST Reads: 7,384 |
Peter Holditch is a senior presales engineer in the UK for Azul Systems. Prior to joining Azul he spent nine years at BEA systems, going from being one of their first Professional Services consultants in Europe and finishing up as a principal presales engineer. He has an R&D background (originally having worked on BEA's Tuxedo product) and his technical interests are in high-throughput transaction systems. "Of the pitch" Peter likes to brew beer, build furniture, and undertake other ludicrously ambitious projects - but (generally) not all at the same time!
