Adaptive method and software architecture for efficient transaction processing and error management

Abstract

A new type of transaction manager is disclosed that provides a unique set of methods and components for efficient transaction processing, error management, and transaction recovery. The combination of these methods and components are applicable to a wide range of business and technical scenarios that do not lend themselves to traditional transaction processing methods, permitting a degree of automation and robustness hitherto impossible. The methods extend and generalize the traditional transaction properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This is a division in part of Ser. No. 10 / 263,589, filed on Oct. 2, 2002. The USPTO issued a restriction requirement on Jan. 12, 2006 requiring the prosecution of either claims 93-181, which invention was classified as belonging to class 707, subclass 8; or claims 182-184, which invention was classified as belonging to class 707, subclass 202. Prosecution of claims 93-181 of the first invention continued under the above-referenced application and serial number. This divisional application is filed to continue the prosecution, separately, of the invention described in claims 182-184, and expressly incorporates both below and by reference all of the original, pre-divisional application's specification and drawings.STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT [0002] Not Applicable DESCRIPTION OF ATTACHED APPENDIX [0003] Not Applicable BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0004] A transaction can be defined as a set of actions on ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0050] In particular, these sub-methods include: (1) establishing and using consistency points which minimizes the cost of recovery under certain types of error; (2) transaction relaying which permits work sharing across otherwise isolated transactions, while simultaneously minimizing the impact of failures; (3) corrective transactions which permit error recovery without unnecessarily undoing work, without so-called compensating transactions, and while enabling the tracking and correlation of errors and their correction; (4) lookahead-based resource management based on dependencies which enables optimized resource usage within and among transactions; and, (5) dependency-based concurrency optimization which enables optimized scheduling and isolation of transactions while avoiding the high cost of locking and certain other concurrency protocols wherever possible. Each of these sub-methods is capable of being used in complex transaction environments (including distributed, linked, and mixed) while avoiding the overhead associated with traditional transaction management techniques such as two-phase commit, each can be used in combination with the others, and each of these are detailed in the description of the invention below.

Problems solved by technology

As outlined above, the usual interpretation of the ACID properties introduces a number of difficulties.

The current interpretation of the atomicity property has resulted in an approach to error recovery that is costly in terms of both time and other resources in that it requires the ability to return affected resources to an initial state.

The current interpretation of the consistency property recognizes consistent states only at explicit transaction boundaries, resulting in excessive processing at the end of a transaction and increased chance of failure.

The isolation property is interpreted as strictly precluding the sharing of modified resources and operations, so that performance is affected and certain operations may be performed redundantly even when they are identical.

All of these taken together result in less than optimal use of resources and inefficient error recovery mechanisms.

The traditional techniques for preserving the ACID properties, optimizing resource usage, and recovering from errors cannot be applied effectively in many business environments involving complex transactions, especially those pertaining to global electronic commerce and business process automation.

Just as serializability provides no guarantee as to which apparent ordering of the transactions will result, so the new understanding of a logical transaction provides no guarantee as to which consistent state in the class of achievable states will result.

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