RE: "Record in use" message & resulting mess

Rob Stagis writes


It's not necessarily either one's fault - if the terminal goes down in the
middle of receiving, for instance, when somebody decides ram a forklift
into
the power line, the terminal will die, the program won't complete it's
processing on tat record, adn the PO will forever say "In use" until it's
repaired.....causing issues when somebody else maintains it, or whatever.

This depends on the goals of the software. I maintained ERP systems in the
mainframe environment for years. At one place I was at, in two years I
DBU'd a file once, and the vendor was not happy to hear from me (This was
absolutely unacceptable). It's called commitment control folks. Until the
entire transaction is complete, the system will back out any changes made
if a rampaging fork lift takes your program out.  The appearance (not the
reality) is that no updates are done, until all updates are ready to be
done. Unfortunately this requires journalling and a high degree of
overhead. Since BPCS goes into many small shops unwilling to pay the
machine price for commitment control, they end up paying us to dink around
in their files. That's the business excuse. Probably the real reason you
don't see it in BPCS is that SSA never felt the need to invest in the
technology (Unix was more exciting), and perhaps those who managed SSA
development did not understand the concept. BPCS gives up transaction
integrity for quick and dirty development, and fewer machine resources.

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