Figure 8. Two-Phase Commit Processing, All Resources Voted Reliable.
Wailfor Outcome
Late acknowledgment implies that the intermediate does not respond to its coordinator until it has collected acknowledg ments from its subordinates, even if failures occur that require recovery processing. For major system failures, waiting for recovery processing may involve considerable delay. An inter mediate may make multiple attempts to contact a subordinate before it succeeds.
When implementing the PN protocols for APPC in VM/ESA, usa bility evaluations uncovered a problem with this aspect of late acknowledgment: a human waiting for the outcome of a trans action gets very impatient waiting for recovery processing to complete [22]. Some people would rather get control back earlier, even if they could not be guaranteed certainty that the transaction completed without heuristic damage.
A feature was added to the IBM PN protocols and the APPC interface [14, 17] to allow the application program to specify whether it requires all recovery processing to complete before it is told the outcome of the commit operation. If yes, then late acknowledgment occurs as usual; the coordinator application is blocked, awaiting all acknowledgments and recovery processing to occur. If no, one attempt to contact a failed partner 1s attempted. If the first attempt fails, the system attempts to com plete the recovery processing in the background, but allows the
There can be speci fie resources withi n an overall OB syste11 (e.g. a specif i c set of tabl es, or a specif i c set of IHS/ESA OU databases) that are not allowed to be heuri sti cally changed. For exampl e, i n CICS/HVS, protected transient data can someti111es have thi s property, whil e all other resources are subject to heuri sti c damage.