IBM WebSphere: Deployment and Advanced Configuration

Distributed Transaction Failure Recovery

We've spent quite a bit of time describing how transactions are supposed to behave: Each RM and TM nicely commits or rolls back as required. However, as you might imagine, in the real world, things don't always work that way. Sometimes, there can be more serious failure involving the loss of a participant. That is, an RM or TM might simply fail. By fail, we don't mean that the RM or TM decides to rollback; we mean that it may have crashed and disappeared (at least briefly). In this situation, the TM has to handle some more complex error scenarios through what we call the recovery process. We describe those here. Failures can occur at any time or any place. When dealing with XA transactions, there are three ...