Reconciling Replication and Transactions for the End-to-End Reliability of CORBA Applications

Abstract. The CORBA standard now incorporates support for reliability through two distinct mechanisms — replication (using the Fault Tolerant CORBA standard) and transactions (using the CORBA Object Transaction Service). Transactions represent a roll-back reliability mechanism, and handle a fault by reverting to the last committed state, and by discarding operations that were in progress at the time of the fault. Replication represents a roll-forward reliability mechanism, and handles a fault by re-playing any operations that were in progress at another operational replica of the crashed server. Most of today’s enterprise applications have a three-tier structure, with simple clients in the first tier, servers in the middle-tier to perform the processing, and databases in the third tier to store information. For such applications, replication is required to protect the middle-tier processing, while transactions are required to protect the third-tier data. This requires the reconcil...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: COOPIS
• Authors: Pascal Felber, Priya Narasimhan
• Keywords: COOPIS 2002, CORBA Standard, Fault Tolerant CORBA, Information System, Reliability Mechanisms