Fault-tolerant system and method of managing transaction failures in hierarchies

A method for managing a first process including transactions wherein one or more of the transactions may be subtransaction of others, comprising:

• (a) providing a hierarchy of blocks of transactions of the first process in which all nonterminal transactions are linked hierarchically, some of the blocks being subblocks of others;
• (b) noticing failure in a transaction in a second process whose transactions are not transactions of the first process, wherein a failure of the second-process transaction will cause a failure of a transaction (FFT) in the first process;
• (c) identifying an ancestor tree of the FFT and on the ancestor tree a closest recoverable ancestor (CRA) in a block containing the CRA, the CRA being the nearest in-block recoverable transaction to the FFT;
• (d) identifying a closest in-progress ancestor (CIP) of the CRA, the CIP being the nearest transaction to the CRA, on the ancestor tree of the FFT, that is neither committed nor aborted.
• (e) identifying a closest recoverable in-progress ancestor (ERA) of the CIP, the ERA being the nearest transaction to the CIP, on the ancestor tree of the FFT, that is in-block recoverable in a block containing the CIP;
• and
• (f) undoing all transactions from the ERA downward by at least one of the group of aborting and compensating from the ICRA to the FFT.

A program storage medium readably by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instruction including code means executable by the computer to manage transactions in a process in a database system wherein the process has a plurality of transactions in nested form having more than two levels of hierarchies, the program storage medium comprising:

• a memory device having code means, said code means including,
• (a) code means for noticing the success or failure in a failure-causing transaction not in the process, wherein the noticed success or failure of the failure-causing transaction will cause a failure of a transaction (FFT) in the process;
• (b) code means for identifying an ancestor tree of the failed transaction FFT in the process, the ancestor tree including nested blocks of transaction in the process, the code means further for identifying on the ancestor tree an in-progress recoverable ancestor (ICRA) closest to the failed transaction FFT without regard to the level of hierarchy of the ICRA in the process the failed transaction occurs, the ICRA being the nearest in-block recoverable transaction to the FFT and in progress in a ICRA-containing block;
• and
• (c) code means for undoing all transactions from the ICRA downward, including at least one of the group of aborting and compensating from the ICRA to the FFT.