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Peter Holditch
Peter Holditch is a senior presales engineer in the UK for Azul Systems. Prior to joining Azul he spent nine years at BEA systems, going from being one of their first Professional Services consultants in Europe and finishing up as a principal presales engineer. He has an R&D background (originally having worked on BEA's Tuxedo product) and his technical interests are in high-throughput transaction systems. "Of the pitch" Peter likes to brew beer, build furniture, and undertake other ludicrously ambitious projects - but (generally) not all at the same time! |
Is the Glass Half Full or
Half Empty? By Peter Holditch  In this column over the
years, I have spent a
considerable amount of
time talking about
contention and locking in
the database tier. At the
end of the day, the
endless conversations
about scaling the
application tier boil
down to less than a bag
of beans if a scal... Feb. 18, 2006 10:30 AM Reads: 10,482 Replies: 1 | Avoiding Middle-Aged
Spread for Your WebLogic
Infrastructure By Peter Holditch  I have been knocking
around the computer
industry for a while now,
and I've noticed some
changes in my
contemporaries and
myself... For one thing,
the buttons around the
stomach of those old
shirts that have eluded
capture by my wife are
looking a bit more
strai... Jan. 26, 2006 06:45 PM Reads: 11,602 Replies: 1 | WebLogic Performance:
Pursuit of Speed Isn't
Everything By Peter Holditch  'High performance' is
what everybody strives
for when putting together
a new system. Technical
folk often spend hours
hung up on the raw speed
of their code, and a
certain machismo can be
derived from shaving
milliseconds off that
pesky transaction that is
the lat... Oct. 29, 2005 12:15 PM Reads: 12,798 Replies: 3 | Defragment Your View of
the World for a Quiet
Life By Peter Holditch  The value of two phase
commit transactions has
always been that
programmers can write
applications that access
data spread across
multiple databases and be
confident that any
updates that are made
will be consistently
reflected in all of the
databases, or none, at... Aug. 8, 2005 12:00 PM Reads: 8,750 | Acid Reign By Peter Holditch  In browsing around the
Web, as one occasionally
does in a free
nanosecond, I read an
interesting article about
twp-phase commit
transactions by Gregor
Hohpe of ThoughtWorks
('Your Coffee Shop Does
Not Use Two Phase
Commit'). Gregor comes at
the subject from the
... Jun. 21, 2005 01:00 PM Reads: 8,464 | Measuring the Value of
Software Infrastructure By Peter Holditch As I write, the noise
level that continues to
be generated around open
source application
servers and their claims
to be coming into the
world of enterprise
computing continues. In
my view, the main reason
why the noise travels so
far and seems so loud has
nothing... Feb. 11, 2005 12:00 AM Reads: 12,052 | And Now for Something
Completely Different By Peter Holditch This issue, in an
uncharacteristic attempt
to fit in with the
Zeitgeist, I propose to
depart slightly from my
well-trodden path to the
transaction manager and
take a look at
frameworks. I expect you
can guess which
particular framework I am
going to take a pass at... Nov. 16, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 11,720 | Transactions for the Next
Generation By Peter Holditch A realization has dawned
across the industry that
'service-oriented
architecture' is a good
thing. In fact, this is
less of a dawning and
more of a reawakening. Sep. 10, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 10,171 | Notes from a Small Place By Peter Holditch As we've discussed over
the past few issues,
JTA-style transactions
provide a way for
multiple data updates to
be tied together so
application logic can
operate safely in the
assumption that it will
succeed or fail
consistently, even in the
face of technical
failures along the road. Jul. 13, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 11,079 | Transactions: Driving You
to Distraction? By Peter Holditch One definition of a
commodity is something
that you take for
granted. I'll bet there
aren't many readers out
there who wake in the
morning and exclaim,
'Thank goodness there's
air in the room to
breathe!' Likewise,
computer users will
seldom give thanks for
thei... May. 17, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 13,248 | Transactions, Suspension,
and the Ticking Clock By Peter Holditch This month's article is
again inspired by a
posting on the weblogic.d
eveloper.interest.transac
tion newsgroup. The
question (excerpted from
the posting) was: Does
the 10 in
weblogic-ejb-jar.xml
apply to transactions
that are in a suspended
state? Apr. 9, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 17,989 Replies: 1 | How Loose is Your
Coupling? By Peter Holditch Whatever your innermost
feelings about the
symbols, and however
fondly you remember
debugging network
infrastructures with
nothing more than a LAN
sniffer and an uncanny
ability to interpret 4k
blocks of hex, it is
fairly safe to say that
Web services are here to... Mar. 10, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 10,313 | Transactions: How
Distributed Are Yours? By Peter Holditch Another discussion based
on a weblogic.developer.i
nterest.transaction
posting this month. It's
a newsgroup that always
proves to be a good
source of information for
the world at large when
it comes to transactional
behavior (and a good
source of inspiration for
me... Feb. 26, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 12,916 | Transactions: Are You in
Control? By Peter Holditch The launch of BEA's
WebLogic Platform 8.1 was
greeted with enthusiasm
by industry analysts and
IT practitioners alike,
who recognized its
potential to open up the
power of the J2EE
platform to a much
broader spectrum of
developers. Jan. 9, 2004 12:00 AM Reads: 9,118 | Four Legs Good, Two Legs
Bad? By Peter Holditch The buzz in the industry
these days is all about
service-oriented
architecture. One of the
key benefits that this
brings is loose coupling
between systems, which in
turn improves the agility
of the overall
architecture Dec. 1, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 9,500 | Transactions: How Big Are
Your Atoms? By Peter Holditch This month's article is
again inspired by an
interesting design
discussion posted on the
weblogic.developer.transa
ction newsgroup. (Ever
get the feeling I'm
running short of
inspiration? Ideas for
new articles always
welcome!) Nov. 6, 2003 03:24 PM Reads: 9,564 | Application Environments,
Migration, and
Transactions By Peter Holditch No, don't worry, it's not
a a floor-wax/dessert-top
ping/toothpaste article
this month; it's simply a
look at how multilanguage
application environments
might be used together in
highly distributed
systems. Oct. 3, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 9,181 | Transaction Not
Supported? Just Say No! By Peter Holditch This month I was again
inspired by the weblogic
.developer.interest.trans
action newsgroup on
newsgroups.bea.com - if
you weren't listening
last time I plugged this
newsgroup, listen now;
one day, it might save
your life! Sep. 10, 2003 01:50 PM Reads: 9,874 | Freedom, Disasters, and
Getting Something for
Nothing By Peter Holditch In most large-scale
'mission critical'
systems, high on the list
of requirements is
resistance to failure.
With the world living in
fear of violent
destruction post 9/11, it
is more common for the
definition of 'failure'
in this context to be the
loss of a whole
... Aug. 7, 2003 01:12 PM Reads: 8,063 | Listen Very Carefully; I
Shall Say This Only Once! By Peter Holditch I have a rather deaf and
rather elderly
grandmother. She is a
lovely woman and can
spend hours telling tales
- sometimes fascinating
and sometimes... well,
less fascinating - about
times past. May. 27, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 8,293 | Transactions - Just
Another Tinkertoy? By Peter Holditch Over the past 16 months -
has it really been that
long?! - I have
attempted to climb the
peaks of how to design
applications that use
transactions, and dived
into the depths of the
earth, looking at obscure
knowledge such as how
clients can demarcate
transactions... Apr. 22, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,774 | Lightning Never Strikes
Twice? By Peter Holditch I thought I would devote
this month's column to a
subject that appeared a
while ago in the weblogic
.developer.interest.trans
action newsgroup on
newsgroups.bea.com. As an
opening comment, if you
have never seen these
newsgroups and you are a
WebLogic developer, then ... Mar. 27, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 7,251 | Sending Messages to the
Other Side By Peter Holditch This month, I thought I
would take a
below-the-surface look at
what needs to be done to
achieve transactional
access to the IBM
MQSeries messaging
product from WebLogic
Server within the context
of an Xa transaction
managed by WebLogic's JTA
subsystem. Of course, ... Jan. 20, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 8,722 | Transactions: That's
enough of your source! By Peter Holditch A common complaint in the
transaction newsgroup is,
'I've done my database
updates in a JTA
transaction, but they
didn't complete as a
unit!' In many
cases, the explanation
for this unfortunate loss
of ACID is that the
database connections that
were used ... Dec. 17, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 8,625 | Transactions: the Lingua
Franca of ComputersÂ… By Peter Holditch The waves of IT, as they
are often called to, are
marked out reasonably
accurately by languages.
Starting almost at the
beginning, take COBOL.
With its love of
uppercase characters, and
overly restrictive
attitude to what column
the uppercase characters
appear in... Nov. 19, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 7,334 | Programmatic Clients,
Symmetry, and the Humble
Ant By Peter Holditch Picnicking during my
summer holidays with my
family, I was a little
peeved to find that we
had set up camp near an
ant hill and some of them
had decided to help
themselves to elements of
our lunch. Just as well,
really, that I prefer
sausage rolls and pork
pies to... Oct. 15, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 6,921 | WebLogic Server System
Administration By Peter Holditch Why are application
servers so boring? I
guess the answer to this
question depends on your
perspective. One man's
boring commodity is
another man's lifeblood.
That observation alone
would make for a rather
short column, so we need
another question. Sep. 24, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 7,723 | Transactions: How Do They
Go with the Flow? By Peter Holditch As I may have mentioned
once or twice in this
column over the
foregoing months,
developers can derive a
large amount of value
from building their
applications on an
application server. Aug. 23, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 9,635 | Show Me Some Commitment -
Connecting with
Transactions By Peter Holditch For several months now
I've waxed lyrical about
transactions and how they
hide the complexities of
distributed updates in
applications, and indeed
the concept of the
two-phase commit
transaction is a very
powerful one, allowing
you to make the
assumption that all ... Aug. 2, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 6,567 | Transactions,
Commitmentand Security By Peter Holditch I've seen several posts
in the public WebLogic
server transactions
newsgroup in which people
have had problems with
transactions spread
across multiple servers.
The gist of these
problems is always that
they have two EJB
components in two
different servers. Bean ... May. 20, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 7,764 | Transactions and
Beans:Why have a dog and
bark yourself? By Peter Holditch That was what an old
girlfriend periodically
said to me. Needless to
say, we're no longer
together - I wasn't keen
on the comparison. 'Shall
I compare thee to a dog?'
is rather less poetic
than I like. But in
thinking about this
month's transaction
column, the co... Apr. 17, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 7,658 | Transactions, where do
they begin and end? By Peter Holditch As we've discussed over
the past few issues,
JTA-style transactions
provide a way for
multiple data updates to
be tied together so
application logic can
operate safely in the
assumption that it will
succeed or fail
consistently, even in the
face of technical
fai... Mar. 26, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 7,104 | Transactions: What are
they, anyway? By Peter Holditch As I understand Western
ideas about the world,
there seem to have been
three distinct phases
through which they have
passed. In the beginning,
people believed that the
world was flat, and at
the center of the
universe. Eventually,
this view was confounded
by the l... Feb. 20, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 6,621 | Transactions - When
They're Hot and When
They're Not By Peter Holditch Sad, I mused - you don't
often see that any more.
My mind then wandered to
hoping that, as
technologists, we aren't
somehow tacitly colluding
in the erosion of the
fabric that holds society
together. Hmm, I seem to
have come over all
melancholy. Excuse me
whilst I... Feb. 6, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 9,718 | Acid Reign By Peter Holditch Since this will be a
monthly column on the
subject of transactions,
which from my experience
seems to be a subject
that everybody has heard
of, but nobody is
familiar with, I thought
I would build up speed
with a back-to-basics
look at transactions,
what they are and what
they're for. Jan. 7, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 6,631 |
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