VAXman's Musings Soapbox

The immorality of immortality. — Part 2

In the article "The immorality of immortality — Part 1," I discussed various problems stemming from the setting of the PCB$V_NODELET bit on INTERACTIVE processes by the database product, Caché. The first installment of this article was intended to serve more as a cathartic expository of problems which the setting of this bit can create as well as an exposé of one commercial product doing so, and less of a dissertation about the ways to address or correct the problem. In this follow-up, I will explore various ways to achieve what I believe the Caché product is trying to achieve without making the erroneous "NODELET" pact with the devil.

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The immorality of immortality. — Part 1

In recent weeks, I've been dealing with a process "immortality" issue on a large university medical center's OpenVMS cluster. This particular OpenVMS cluster is running a database product known as Caché. Its implementers, to maintain ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) access to the database, chose to make OpenVMS processes running Caché immortal by setting the process status bit known as the "NODELET" (PCB$V_NODELET) bit. Their justification for setting this bit is/was to thwart uncontrolled process termination; however, there are very serious ramifications when setting this bit that make it a highly undesirable practice.

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