Using COM Reliability

Graceful fail-over and fault tolerance mechanisms are important, especially for applications that require high availability. The COM connector provides basic support for fault tolerance at the protocol level.

You should take additional precautions to provide further reliability. After you use the COM connector to enter an order or execute a business function, the process should:

• Handle transaction failures.

  Transactions can fail because of communication line failures. Sometimes transactions must be aborted because of errors in input or deadlocks. These failures must be handled appropriately.

• Wait for the confirmation or success notification from the business function to ascertain that the call was successfully committed.

• Query on the order entered to make sure that it has been committed to the database.

  Due to high network traffic, a business function can properly execute, but the confirmation message might not reach you.