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From: gupta@fornax.UUCP (Ranabir Gupta)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Long (Design) Transactions Summary
Keywords: Responses to Query, research, products, object oriented
Message-ID: <2207@fornax.UUCP>
Date: 28 Feb 91 03:59:27 GMT
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 86

Thanks to all those who responded to my query about products/research which
support long (upto days) transactions on shared objects by many users in a
design/planning environment. 

I'd offered to summarize on the net - here's the summary. One person sent
email asking me to mail him the summary. Sorry, I deleted your email by
mistake. I hope you're reading this ...
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The problem:
1) Many 'objects' shared by many planners/designers.
2) Designers want to commit updates to sets of these objects en masse, much
   like a transaction.
3) Catch: Designers would like to examine these objects for days before
   committing their transactions.
4) This leads to following hassles:
    a) can't lock objects accessed by one user for fear of crippling all the
       others' work.
    b) user A must have some way of knowing which other users are accessing
       or planning to modify the objects (s)he's looking at, and must be
       notified of (impending) changes to those objects, so that days worth
       of planning does not get washed away at commit time when (s)he discovers
       that some object has been changed 'on the sly' while (s)he wasn't looking
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Responses:
(In general, this is not a properly explored area. Most attempts seem to be
 stabs at part of the problem)

Research (Academia):
1) Matthias Jarke and group are working on ConceptBase at University of
   Passau. This system contains some of the features involved. It can
   support design groups spread over continents (over Internet). They
   are writing a "Conceptbase V3.0 manual". Contacts:
       jarke@unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de
       jeusfeld@andorfer.fmi.uni-passau.de
2) Using ConceptBase to implement cooperative software development
   (GroupWare) is an activity under John Mylopoulos at University of
   Toronto. Possible contact:
      rose@telos.ai.toronto.edu
   There's apparently some more interest in the subject there.
3) At CMU, a long transaction facility has been implemented as part of the
   Gandalf Software Environment Generator, which seems to satisfy most
   of the requirements. ref:
   Charles Krueger, Persistent Long-Term Transactions for Software Development,
   Tech Rep. CMU-CS-90-188, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
   University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, Dec, 1990
4) Other refs:
    a) Won Kim, HF Korth, A Model for CAD Transactions, Proc. of VLDB 1985,
       Stockholm, 1985
    b) Henry F Korth, W Kim, F Bancilhon, On Long Duration CAD Transactions,
       Information SCiences, v46, 1988 pp73-107
    c) Henry F Korth, Long Duration Transactions in Software Design Projects,
       Proc. 6th Int'l Conf. on Data Engineering, Feb 1990, Los Ang. CA
    d) Patrick E O'Neil, The Escrow Transactional Method, ACM Transaction on 
       Database Systems, V11, no4, 1986, pp405-430

Commercial Systems:
1) William J. Doucette
   Object Design Inc.
   1450 E. AMerican Lane, Suite 1400
   Schaumberg IL 60173
   This company has a product which has an explicit mandate to support
   distributed design and subcequent reconciliation of the resulting
   designs.
2) Sun's Network Software Environment has a flavour of long transactions. It
   is oriented towards file-sized software 'objects'. Refs:
   a) William Courington, J Feiber, M Honda, NSE Highlights, Chapter 3, The
      SunTechnology Papers, Springer-Verlag, 1990
   b) Evan W Adams, M Honda, TC Miller, Object Management in a CASE Environment
      Proc. ACM-SIGSOFT 11th Int'l. Conf. on Software Engineering, Pittsburgh,
      PA May 1989
   c) (Mysterious One) MCC and NCR may be doing something in this area.

Thanks to:
Manfred Jeusfeld
Chris Arnold
Vinay Chaudhri
Charles Krueger
Dave Miller
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Disclaimer: I can't imagine why someone would like to nail me or anyone else
            for any of this, but hey! this is america, and so I disclaim all
	    knowledge of the constructive/destructive/soporific properties of
	    any of the products/papers mentioned herein, so help me God.

Ciao,
   thanks again, ranabir