Distributed Transaction Processing with Encina ® and the OSF TM DCE

To stay competitive, your enterprise requires fast and reliable access to information. You must also be able to easily keep this information up-to-date, even across system failures and as it is shared among many users. By addressing these needs, online transaction processing (OLTP) continues to be the foundation of commercial computing. Distributed and open computing now offer the promise of multi-vendor solutions that deliver application interoperability and portability. At the same time, open systems provide the freedom to select and upgrade computing platforms as needs evolve. In this way, open, distributed systems are the basis for an enterprise computing strategy that preserves investment. This article describes the benefits of selecting an open, distributed OLTP computing environment. We also explore scenarios whereby open, distributed OLTP systems can be used in conjunction with existing mainframe-based OLTP monitors such as CICS ®. Within this framework, we introduce Transarc's Encina ® family of products that addresses this marketplace.Encina is based on the Open Software Foundation's (OSF™) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). Encina extends many of the DCE services to provide a full-featured TP environment for transactional client-server computing. This article describes the benefits you gain by selecting an open, distributed computing environment for online transaction processing (OLTP). The article also explores scenarios whereby you can use open OLTP systems in conjunction with your existing mainframe-based OLTP monitors, such as CICS. Within this framework, Transarc's and IBM's Encina product for open, distributed OLTP is introduced. Encina extends the Open Software Foundation's (OSF's) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) to support transactional client-server computing. A full-featured TP monitor itself, the Encina technology also underlies CICS/6000. INTRODUCTION TO OLTP Online transaction processing (OLTP), or simply transaction processing (TP), is the foundation of commercial data processing throughout the world. TP systems, or Monitors, offer your enterprise a secure, reliable means for recording sales, orders, transfers, reservations, and any other updates to data that is shared, potentially among many thousands of your users. TP monitors must preserve those updates, even in the face of failures in your systems or applications. In this way, for example, your record of a credit card sale is not lost even when a machine crashes. TP systems also ensure the consistency of your data, potentially even geographically distributed data. This is achieved by protecting multi-step operations from partial failures, so that no monies can be lost in a funds transfer, even if the associated debit initially succeeds …