Re: Tuxedo?

In article <5gt8r7$5o1_at_siesta.cs.wustl.edu>,   zqx_at_siesta.cs.wustl.edu (Zeqing Xia) wrote:
>
> Hello Everyone,
>
> My company is considering using some TP monitor system for transaction
> processing. In particular we are interested in Tuxedo, Encina, etc..
> I wonder if some one with working experience can kindly provide with
> me some advice/lessons on this issue. Below is a list of questions
> that I put together, without much in-depth knowledge of either products:
>
> 1. What is the development time-to-product/market? How long is the
> training process for developers?

There are a lot of pitfalls if you have no previous experience with 3-tier, but if you have some toolkits and architecture, the time to market is less than 20% more for a 3-tier architecture in a 3GL environment. The key is having an established set of tools, techniques, and experience. If you're using a 4GL environment, then this drops even further if you have some experience with tools.

I've had really good results with NCR's TOP END, which has Active/X support for its interface and supports Visual Basic and Java clients and servers, so development can be pretty rapid for non-performance critical pieces.

>
> 2. What is the cost/staffing requirements in administration?

Add an administrator, and expect the development staff to have to do a little bit more on-call support. Also a little additional development time to work on operational procedures, esp. if you're looking at 24 x 7 with online backup, ability to add nodes/computer, and want bulletproof operational procedures from day 1.

When evaluating products, take a look at: -- Is administration fault-tolerant, or support multiple full-featured consoles? -- Do all components (Internet, legacy, UNIX, NT, etc.) have the same interace? -- Does the product support GUI, command-line, and API interfaces?

>
> 3. How complicated or error-proness of either of the APIs? Tricks and traps?

Its not too bad if you start with a bunch of shells or models for the stuff you are trying to do, but their can be a ton of pitfalls otherwise.

I'd be happy to talk about some of these in more detail.

>
> 4. Is there any performance problem with the two-phase commit with a
> RDBMS backend? Can I do 50, 100/sec inserts and updates to two or three
> databases at the same time?

I would look very carefully and prove out any XA performance-critical pieces. While these pieces get better all the time, I did have problems in the past with Tuxedo and Oracle/XA in early versions of Oracle 7.0/7.1 (but that way 2 years ago).

TOP END and Encina don't require each piece of a 2-phase commit to occur from separate processes, which improves performance some.

>
> 5. What about the future of the products? CORBA? Is Orcle/Sybase/Micrsoft
> doing anything in this area?

Microsoft is committed to DCOM and its version of an ORB is MTS. They will let other vendors build bridges to CORBA applications. My personal prediction is that it will be a while before any high-performance, scalable application can be built on MTS, whereas something like TOP END runs the store systems for Wal-Mart and handles mega-transaction loads.

Some of the TP Monitors, TOP END, Tuxedo, will have some form of CORBA to TP Monitor gateway. I hear rumors that TOP END's will come out early this summer.

All the TP Monitors will also provide OTS support to CORBA as well, some of these products are in beta now.

>
> 6. Are the APIs object-oriented or rather low-level buffer/offset counting
> stuff? How can I incorporate that into an distributed OO app framework?

I have used the G2 buffer management system that provides tag-name/value pair matching and provides class support for it. This works with both TOP END and Tuxedo.

>
> 7. How long does it take to have a proof of concept and the decision
> making procedure?

Depends on the proof-of-concept. I do alot of these, and we always try to show significant results in a 1 to 2-week timeframe.

>
> Again, thanks very much for your help. Your suggestions and advice are
> highly, highly appreciated.

Feel free to contact me at 908-575-9100 or alanc_at_entersoft.com for more detailed information.

Best Regards,
Alan Crowther

>
> Fred Xia
>
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> E*Trade Group, Inc. | #include <std/disclaimer.h>
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