Suggestions to ZOIS

These are suggestions made by our readers and some responses about enhancements to the ZOIS site.

So far there's been suggestions on ...

• Arjuna
• Idiot's Guide.
• Broken links.
• Open-UTM.
• Origin of Name "Zois".

22th August 2000

Richard from Philadelphia writes ...

I was perusing your site and wanted to update your information about Arjuna Limited. They were acquired by Bluestone. The press release contains most of the pertinent information. If you have some questions feel free to contact me.

Also, I am trying to create a timeline of transactioning history. Do you have any such thing?

Answer

Thanks for the update. As you can see I've not been to the Arjuna web site recently and thus have failed to note the arjuna.co.uk commercialization and subsequent Bluestone acquisition. It looks like Arjuna is following the path of others in the field of becoming an a CORBA OTS and thence the engine of a EJB Containers' transaction service (see Iceberg to M3 to Weblogic and Component Broker to Websphere from the big guys).

I'll have to update that page. I've a fondness for Arjuna and I thought the use of C++ Class constructor/destructor to mark Transaction boundaries was neat (if ultimately not easily transferable to fashionable non-intrusive lazy garbage collection found elsewhere).

I've now updated the pages on the groves of Academia and Object Transaction Managers (OTM) to reflect the change.

I don't have a time-line of OLTP (electronic and to hand). I've seen and may have a paper copy of a thing written by a chap at IBM which was something along those lines though. This was an effort commissioned by IBM Hursley Park on the occasion of some CICS milestone or other and was primarily concerned with that fine Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM). A fairly self congratulatory, quip and in-joke laden effort, as you can imagine. I say "may have" for this will involve some archeology.

I've taken this on as a suggestion. I'd be grateful to any and all input about when things appeared in major TPM, such as Logical Units of Work, Distributed Transaction Processing and the like in CICS, IMS, ATF &al.

From the transactional point of view, SQL Transactions, and I take it you mean EXEC SQL COMMIT and so forth, are only single phase. This means that the transaction cannot be distributed across multiple RM. Typically TPMs also provide scaling and through put, a factor not lost on DB suppliers who use TPMs in their benchmarking (they usually use Tuxedo and occasionally Encina).

TPM are generally pretty complexed beasts and generally come with a variety of tools to aid their management. Most of these have acquired GUI interfaces by now. TPM management has been integrated into distributed system management tools such as Tivoli. A transactional SNMP MIB has been written for Tuxedo and others have been integrated into Operating System management tools such as AIX's SMIT.

That "idiots guide" is a useful suggestion. It has been put before, something a little more basic that the executive summary. This paper is in the queue behind the updated Microsoft which itself is delayed by me trying to find out the latest about MTS 3.0 and so forth, until recently a bit of a moving target.

Your company (in London at least) has been involved in a Top End project for a large financial news distribution organization. I know so for I worked on it as well. I've also seen stuff done on Encina by Logica too. So there'll be a few folk you can talk to.

An "Idiot's Guide" was eventually written in the form of a dialogue for non-cognoscente.

1st July 1998

Sue and Tom Zois write ...

FYI, Zois is a Greek surname. The word "zois" means "life" in Greek. As life insurance is one of the biggest industries there, we saw our name on billboards everywhere we went.

Reply

Thanks, I've had it confirmed that `zoi' is Greek for life, and in certain cases it takes an `s'. I'll mention that in my next update.

It's fortunate that, as ZOIS was a name chosen by chance (and it could equally have been IOSZ, or something) that it means life, and not something less savoury.

I take it this e-mail was prompted by the question about ZOIS's name in Mr. OLTP's answers.

24th July 1998

Stuart Matthews writes ...

You seem to have missed out a major european player. Take a look at UTM.

Reply

Thanks for bring this to my attention. I have been briefly invloved with this fine TPM some years ago when it was one of a number of TPM evaluated by the ITSA (computer folks at the DSS). Micheal Gordon, you may remember him, was involved with this. Sadly I didn't get too involved (the installation and so forth went like clock work) and I can't pretend to know too much. I will however investigate your web site and possibly produce a page of stuff on TPM we don't know that much about but would like to. Entera and Tibco are other examples.

It's refreshing to not have to discuss the geneology of ZOIS and Cockermouth.

4th October 1998

Roy Bryant writes ...

There appears to be a problem on this page of your site.

On your page http://www.zois.co.uk/credit.html
when you click on your link to http://www.zois.co.uk/credits.html
you get the error: Not found
(This link has since been fixed, Ed).

As recommended by the Robot Guidelines, this email is to explain our robot's activities and to let you know about one of the broken links we encountered. LinkWalker does not store or publish the content of your pages, but rather uses the link information to update our map of the World Wide Web. We use this map of over 500 million links to inform our paying customers when they break links from other sites by moving or deleting a page.

Are these reports helpful? I'd love some feedback. If you prefer not to receive these occasional bad link reports please let me know.

Reply

Although I'm probably replying to something mechanical ...

Thanks for your broken link report. Users are encouraged to report broken links in the fast, er, fastish changing world that is OLTP on UNIX. I routinely run scripts which check the validity of external links to this site. Hubris has until now, lead me to believe that all the internal links are perfect. I'll be modifying those scripts. Thanks once again for your input.

$Date: 2008/08/03 13:14:45 $