XA or non XA in JEE

Question

I have question about this paragraph "Initially, all transactions are local. If a non-XA data source connection is the first resource connection enlisted in a transaction scope, it will become a global transaction when a (second) XA data source connection joins it. If a second non-XA data source connection attempts to join, an exception is thrown." -> link https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19229-01/819-1644/detrans.html (Global and Local TRansaction).

1. Can I have the first connection non XA and the second XA? So the first become xa without any Exception thrown? (I'm in doubt)

2. Can I have fist transaction marked xa, second marked xa and third non xa? (I suppose no)

3. what happens if the first ejb trans-type=required use XA on db and call a remote EJB trans-type=required(deployed in another app server) with a db non-xa? Could I have in this moment two distinct transaction so that xa is not the right choice? What happens if two ejb are in the same server but in two distinct ear?

4. "In scenarios where there is only a single one-phase commit resource provider that participates in the transaction and where all the two-phase commit resource-providers that participate in the transaction are used in a read-only fashion. In this case, the two-phase commit resources all vote read-only during the prepare phase of two-phase commit. Because the one-phase commit resource provider is the only provider to complete any updates, the one-phase commit resource does not have to be prepared." https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEQTP_8.5.5/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/ae/cjta_trans.html What mean for readonly? So we can mix xa updates with readonly non xa?

Answer 1

Some of these should really be split out into separate questions. I can answer the first couple of questions.

1. Can I have the first connection non XA and the second XA?

Yes, if you are willing to use Last Participant Support

1. So the first become xa without any Exception thrown?

No, the transaction manager cannot convert a non-xa capable connection into one that is xa capable. A normal non-xa commit or rollback will be performed on the connection, but it still participates in the transaction alongside the XA resources. I'll discuss how this is done further down in summarizing the Last Participant Support optimization.

2. Can I have fist transaction marked xa, second marked xa and third non xa?

I assume you meant to say first connection marked xa, and so forth. Yes, you can do this relying on Last Participant Support

4. What mean for readonly?

read-only refers to usage of the transactional resource in a way that does not modify any data. For example, you might run a query that locks a row in a database and reads data from it, but does not perform any updates on it.

4. So we can mix xa updates with readonly non xa?

You have this in reverse. The document that you cited indicates that the XA resources can be read only and the non-xa resource can make updates. This works because the XA resources have a spec-defined way of indicating to the transaction manager that they did not modify any data (by voting XA_RDONLY in their response to the xa.prepare request). Because they haven't written any data, they only need to release their locks, so the commit of the overall transaction just reduces to non-xa commit/rollback of the one-phase resource and then either resolution of the xa-capable resources (commit or rollback) would have the same effect.

Last Participant Support

Last Participant Support, mentioned earlier, is a feature of the application server that simulates the participation of a non-xa resource as part of a transaction alongside one or more xa-capable resources. There are some risks involved in relying on this optimization, namely a timing window where the transaction can be left in-doubt, requiring manual intervention to resolve it. Here is how it works:

You operate on all of the enlisted resources (xa and non-xa) as you normally would, and when you are ready, you invoke the userTransaction.commit operation (or rely on container managed transactions to issue the commit for you). When the transaction manager receives the request to commit, it sees that there is a non-xa resource involved and orders the prepare/commit operations to the backend in a special way. First, it tells all of the xa-capable resources to do xa.prepare, and receives the vote from each of them. If all indicate that they have successfully prepared and would be able to commit, then the transaction manager proceeds to issue a commit to the non-xa resource. If the commit of the non-xa resource succeeds, then the transaction manager commits all of the xa-capable resources. Even if the system goes down at this point, it is written in the recovery log that these resources must commit, and the transaction manager will later find them during a recovery attempt and commit them, with their corresponding records in the back end being locked until that happens. If the commit of the non-xa resource fails, then the transaction manager would instead proceed to roll back all of the xa-capable resources. The risk here comes from the possibility that the request to commit the non-xa capable resources might not return at all, leaving the transaction manager no way of knowing whether that resource has committed or rolled back, and thus no way knowing whether to commit or roll back the xa-capable resources, leaving the transaction in-doubt and in need of manual intervention to properly recover. Only enable/rely upon Last Participant Support if you are okay with accepting this risk.