Context management and its applications to distributed transactions

Abstract

An emerging paradigm that handles multiple loci of control in a system allows multiple program threads to work on the same task, each thread to work on a different task, or a thread to work on multiple tasks for greater design flexibility or due to system constraints such as real-time demands and a high load on tasking. We use the definition of context to capture the notion of logical locus of control. The context of the work being currently executed must be identifiable uniquely by the application, the resource managers and the transaction manager because each context represents different work, in this paper, we define context management by defining a local context manager and its user interface. We then show why the notion of context is required to solve the problems that arise in local and distributed transaction processing due to the emerging paradigm. We present solutions to these problems in transaction processing using the proposed context management. © 1998 The British Computer Society.