Transaction BOF IPC10

The purpose of this BOF was to discuss adding a transaction framework/module to python's standard library.

Attendance: ~16

Existing Standards Mentioned

• XA Standard
• Corba Transaction Service
• Java Transaction Service (j2ee)
• Transaction Internet Protocol

Jim Fulton

Jim talked about zope/zodb's transaction protcol. Which is a a two phase commit (tpc) protocol for integration with external transaction aware entities. zodb transaction's include support for subtransaction (non-nested) and are currently timestamped based. Jim mentioned a proof of incompatibility between locking and timestamp based transaction managers.

Kevin Jacobs

Kevin talked about his business integration system experience, specifically in integrating distributed financial systems. Kevin has implemented a Transaction Server with write-ahead logging (WAL) that does solvable proofs, and includes domain specific knowledge to rollback on errors in a two phase commit from the log.

One Liners

• tpc failure from netsplits and catastrophic events.
• transaction logging of txn metadata
• nested txn
• transaction level (serializable)

Action Items

Two PEPs needed

• an update to the dbapi (DB-SIG) (kevin jacobs)

  Update From Kevin,

  I'm waiting for the new standard datetime object before moving forward with my DB-API proposals.

  Hopefully that will start to gel in the next few weeks

• a transaction framework/module (jim fulton)

  Update From Jim

  I think that the action for me was to propose a standard transaction framework.

  I think the action for Kevin was to propose DB API changes to expose TPC capabilities.