Lock Server Alternatives

Lock Servers are generally stand-alone processes, but you can also link a link server with an application server process. That improves performance for the threads in that process. It is a fully functional lock server, so it will service requests from other processes and client machines.

The Objectivity/DB engineering team has considered several lock server implementations over the past few years. We already support distributed transaction management, e.g. using JCA to commit data into Objectivity/DB and some other database. There has been quite a lot of academic work on user customizable transaction modes that can interoperate safely. Clearly, you can't have two applications having different opinions of what "Exclusive Write Access" means. However, it would allow users to define their own semantics for nested, co-operating and other novel transaction modes.

I'll come back to the lock servers and their role in data replication in a future article. If you have any thoughts or requests regarding locking and transaction management, please let us know by commenting on this topic.