maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Sergey!

On Oct 07, Sergey Vojtovich wrote:
> Hi Sergei,
> 
> yes, there are many reasons why cohort may fail during commit phase. Spider
> has a lot reasons too. In this particular case (test case provided by Elena)
> it fails with the following error:
> ERROR 42S02: Table 'mysql.spider_xa' doesn't exist
> 
> Anyway it is not clear how to handle cohort commit failure properly. Let's say
> we have 4 cohorts participating in XA transaction. Cohort 2 and 3 fail.

there're two distinct XA use cases.

1. mariadb works as transaction coordinator, when a transaction involves
   two or more xa-capable storage engines or binlog.

2. there is an external (to this mariadb instance) transaction
   coordinator, that uses XA START, XA COMMIT, etc commands.

In the second case mariadb is simply one of the cohorts, it doesn't know
the big picture and when it fails - it fails, it's up to the transaction
coordinator to recover from this situation.

On the other hand, a failure at XA COMMIT is a catastrophic event:

  XAER_RMERR: Fatal error occurred in the transaction branch - check
  your data for consistency

So if the engine fails in some way that does not impact data
consistency, then it's preferrable if it wouldn't scare the user with
XAER_RMERR, but report that commit was successful and return an error on
the next statement.

Regards,
Sergei