blog.atomikos.com

We are going through exciting times here at Atomikos! Today, we are pleased to announce that we will be offering single-point-of-contact, end-to-end support across different back-end systems for the following database vendors:

• Oracle
• DB2
• SQLServer
• Sybase
• Informix
• PostgreSQL via 2ndQuadrant (added on June 30 2011)

…and the following queuing vendors:

• MQSeries
• ActiveMQ
• SonicMQ

This is an initial list that will probably grow over time (stay in touch to find out).

What does this mean? Well, it means that Atomikos can offer support from the queue to the database and back again without you having to worry about dealing with different support channels.

This support is optional and not included in the standard support subscription. Contact us to find out more…

Data consistency in the cloud is a totally different ball game - as perfectly illustrated by this newsletter issue from ZapThink. Essentially, you have to cope with some form of partition tolerance and stale data values in caches. This is usually summarized as the CAP issue (for more details, see the ZapThink post).

Luckily, the solution to the problem can be as simple as outlined in our solution to the CAP problem.

Life is good

The cloud is an interesting phenomenon, to say the least. Just last week, I witnessed a demo by Adrian Colyer at the What’s Next (Paris) event that left me very impressed because I could easily understand the problems that it solves:

• Slow infrastructure setup is replaced by instant availability of resources (databases, hardware)
• Scalability is trivially easy: on command is all it takes
• Services are promoted as the means of reuse - effectively enabling SOA strategies

I know from experience that these are all pain points in today’s IT infrastructure for just about every big organization. So for mainstream operations, I think the cloud is going to be a killer.

While this is all fine, I still wonder how this will work out for one of our core markets: finance. Sure enough, initial offerings are showing up, but so far nothing really interesting for our retail banking audience. Add to this the fact that most banks are typically very conservative (they have to be) and the cloud for the banking world seems a bit more of a future situation than for the rest of the industry.

But certainly that time will come too, and for those days Atomikos has the exact kind of technology for cloud-enabling transaction guarantees that banks depend on so much. That is because we offer the third generation of TP monitoring technology: light-weight, embeddable, perfectly scalable and SOA capable too.

The future is bright;-)

Check out this interesting presentation on InfoQ by Cesare Pautasso.

We at Atomikos are working with Cesare to research REST and Transactions and how to integrate this with BPM for REST as well; check out this slideshare presentation (also by Cesare).

Over the next months we will be working with 2ndQuadrant to improve the Postgresql XA functionality and streamline compatibility with Atomikos products. During this time, we will gradually elaborate an XA compatibility test kit that will serve both as a test tool and a learning suite for XA features in databases in general.

Interested? Please contact us if you would like to get more details, or if you want to contribute…

It has happened a couple of times that people have asked me how to startup only the recovery part of their applications. While there is no built-in support in Atomikos (for now), here is a way to do it with Spring:

• Concentrate your DataSource, ConnectionFactory and TransactionManager bean definitions in one config file, say infrastructure-config.xml (the term will sound familiar to those who practice Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
• Use this config file in your application; this is your full runtime
• Create a separate Main that initializes Spring with nothing else but this config; this will be your recovery-only rutime

Voila! Enjoy…

Interesting blog post on how to use DBCP in XA mode, with Atomikos as the JTA…

Our maven repository is being migrated to a new location with nexus behind it. This means that download emails no longer contain the repository location until this has been implemented…

Thanks for your understanding!