IBM MQ commit retention with Syncpoint - ibm-mq

here is the Commit and back out from IBM Website:
when a program gets a message from a queue within a unit of work, that message remains on the queue until the program commits the unit of work, but the message is not available to be retrieved by other programs. The message is permanently deleted from the queue when the program commits the unit of work. If the program backs out the unit of work, IBM MQ restores the queue by making the messages available to be retrieved by other programs.
So,if our consumer dead without rollback instruction,how does the message to be handle?
Is there any retention setting of waiting commit time for message with SYNCPOINT enable in IBM MQ?

When connecting to a non-z/OS queue manager, if the program terminates abnormally without a disconnect the message will roll back. If if it issues a disconnect without commit, the commit will be assumed in certain situations. For more details see Usage Notes 2a-c on the IBM MQ doc page MQDISC - Disconnect queue manager:

Related

What happens to uncommited messages if the application suddenly fails?

IBM MQ documentation says:
"If an application disconnects (MQDISC) from a queue manager while a global unit of work coordinated by IBM® MQ is still active, an attempt is made to commit the unit of work. If, however, the application terminates without disconnecting, the unit of work is rolled back as the application is deemed to have terminated abnormally."
The case of application issuing a MQDISC is clear. My doubt is about the second scenario: let's say I'm putting messages and the applicative servers suddenly loss power before the commit. How does the rollback work if the application is not available at all? Would those message end in the DLQ, or...?

IBM MQ queues files rolling over policy

We are using IBM MQ and recently we faced an issue where some messages that were declared as sent to the MQ server by our client application were not consumed by our MQ consumer.
We lacked logging produced/consumed messages so we tried to check messages in MQ server log/data.
We found that messages are stored in /var/mqm/qmgrs/MQ_MANAGER/queues/ but we didn't find there all messages in the queue file (old messages were not found)
What is the rollover policy of IBM MQ and where does old queues files go?
That's not how the queue files work. They are not rollover logs. The same space is continually overwritten as needed to store messages, but messages may not be written there at all if they can be processed through memory caches etc.
PERSISTENT messages are usually logged in files under /var/mqm/log, but there are circumstances where even that can be avoided. Your qmgr's recovery logfile configuration (circular/linear etc) will determine whether historic information about PERSISTENT messages remains available.
NONPERSISTENT messages are never logged in those files.
In IBM MQ messages can be either persistent or non-persistent.
If a message is persistent it will normally be written to the transactional logs (usually under /var/mqm/log/MQ_MANAGER/active) before a commit completes or before the PUT completes if not done under a unit of work.
If a message is non-persistent it will not be written to the transactional logs.
At this point either type of message may reside only in memory and will only be written to the queue file (usually under /var/mqm/qmgrs/MQ_MANAGER/queues) if it needs to offload memory or if it is persistent and a check point is taken.
If the message is consumed in a timely manner it may never be written to the queue file.
The queue file will shrink in size if space taken up by messages that are no longer needed is in use, this happens automatically and is not configurable or documented by IBM as far as I know.
Non-persistent messages generally do not survive a queue manager restart.
Transactional logs can be configured as circular or linear. If circular the logs will be reused once they are no longer needed. If linear with automatic log management (introduced in 9.0.2) they will work similarly to circular. If linear without automatic log management, what happens to logs that are no longer needed would be based on your own log management.
If the message is still in the transactional log you may be able to view it as described in "Where's my message? Tool and instructions to use the MQ recovery log to find out what happened to your persistent MQ messages on distributed platforms".

How to do an explicit ACK when receiving Websphere MQ messages?

I have an application listening to messages on an IBM Websphere MQ queue.
Once a message is consumed, the application performs some processing logic.
If the processing completed OK, I would like the application to acknowledge the message and have it removed from the queue.
If an error occurred while processing, I would like the message to remain in the queue.
How is this implemented? (I'm using the .NET API)
Thanks.
MQ supports a single-phase commit protocol. You specify syncpoint when you get the message, then issue COMMIT or ROLLBACK as required. The default action if the connection is lost is ROLLBACK and if the program deliberately ends without resolving the transaction a COMMIT is assumed. (This is platform dependent so the customary advice is to explicitly call COMMIT and not rely on the class destructors to do it for you.)
This works whether the message is persistent or not. However if the message has an expiry specified and expires after being rolled back there's a chance it won't be seen again.
Of course, if the program issues a ROLLBACK the message will normally be seen again since it goes back to the same spot int he queue and for a FIFO queue that's the top. If the problem with the message is not transient then this causes a poison message loop of read/rollback/repeat. To avoid that the app can check the backout count and if it exceeds some threshold requeue the message to an exception queue.
When using JMS or XMS this is done for you by the class libraries. If the input queue's BOQNAME and BOQTHRESH attributes are set the requeue is to the queue names in BOQNAME. Otherwise a requeue to the Dead Queue is attempted. IF that fails (as it should if the system is properly secured) the listener will stop receiving messages.
The usual advice is to always specify a backout queue and either let the classes use it or code the app to use it.
Please see Usage Notes for MQGET in the MQAPI Reference and the MQGetMessageOptions.NET page in the .Net class reference.
You may want to look at the MQ Reporting Options.
Expiry, Confirmation of Arrival and Confirmation of Delivery can be requested and sent via a response queue back to the sending application by the receiving Queue Manager.
Positive and Negative Acknowledgements can also be generated by the receiving application provided they use the related reporting attributes found in the Message Descriptor.
Exception can be requested and sent via a response queue back to the sending application by any Queue Manager in the transmission chain or generated by the receiving application.
1 Read the message using MQC.MQGMO_SYNCPOINT,
2 process it
3 call MQQueueManager.Commit()
If Commit() is not called explicitly, or implicitly (eg exception is thrown), all messages that have been de-queued will be re-enqueued.

WebSphere MQ .NET client - Backout queue not working

I am not familiar with MQ so forgive me if I'm not explaining myself properly. We have received a message on a queue that is failing when being read with a 2110 MQRC_FORMAT_ERROR. It would seem that the problem is it doesn't have a 'Format' specified, e.g. we are expecting 'MQSTR'. The client code (C#) is catching the MQException and doing a MQQueueManager.Backout() however the message is just going back onto the queue and being read and rejected again by the client.
Looking at the queue I saw that it did not have a backout queue or backout threshold set. The queue manager also did not have a dead letter queue set. So what I've done is setup the DLQ and set the queue's backout queue to it with a backout threshold of 5. However the message is still stuck on the queue being continually read and put back. The backout count for the message is currently approaching 20 million.
I would like to get the backout and DLQ working but if there is another method to just manually delete or move this message that would help for now. It is just a test message so it doesn't matter if we lose it.
EDIT: I've had to clear the queue to get things moving so unfortunately might not be able to test any solutions until it happens again.
MQ native clients do not automatically move erroneous message to BackoutQ or DLQ. Application has to write additional code to move the messages to DLQ or Backout queue. However XMS .NET and JMS clients do this job. XMS .NET is a JMS specification implementation in C# language. XMS .NET comes bundled with MQ Clients package.
Coming to your case:
MQRC_FORMAT_ERROR is not actually an error, it's a warning telling the application that MQ client was not able to convert the incoming message and it delivered an unconverted message to the application. The application must handle this exception and should not rollback such messages. You will need to investigate the application that is sending such messages and fix any issues.
Please see the documentation here.

WebSphere MQ: Message keeps toggling between input queue and backout queue

The logic flow is like this
A message is sent to an input queue
A ProcessorMDB's onMessage() is invoked. Within this method several operations/validations are done
In case of a poison message(msg that application code cannot handle) a RuntimeException is thrown.
This should rollback the transaction. We are seeing evidence in the log file.
There is a backout threshold defined with a backout queue name
once threshold is reached, the message is sent to backout queue
But immediately it starts going back and forth between the input queue and backout queue.
We are using MQMON tool to observe this weird behavior. It continues for ever almost even after the app server(where MDB is running) is shutdown.
We are using Weblogic 10.3.1 and WebSphere MQ 6.02
Any help will be much appreciated, looks like we are running out of ideas.
This sounds like a syncpoint issue. If the QMgr were to issue a COMMIT when a message is requeued inside of a unit of work it would affect all messages under syncpoint inside of that thread. This would cause serious problems if an application had performed several PUT or GET calls prior to hitting the poison message. Rather than issue a COMMIT outside of the program's control, the QMgr just leaves the message on the backout queue inside the unit of work and waits for the program to issue the COMMIT. This can lead to some unexpected behavior such as what you are seeing where a message lands back on the input queue.
If another message is in the queue behind the "bad" one and it is processed successfully by the same thread, everything works out perfectly. The app issues a COMMIT on the new message and this also affects the poison message on the Backout Queue. However if the thread were to exit uncleanly (without an explicit disconnect or COMMIT) then the transaction is rolled back and the poison message is returned to the input queue.
The usual way of dealing with this is that the next good message (or batch of messages if transactions are batched) in the input queue will force the COMMIT. However in some cases where the owning thread gets no new work (perhaps it was performing a GET by Correlation ID) there is nothing to push the bad message through. In these cases, it is important to make sure that the application issues a COMMIT before ending. One way to do this is to write the code to perform the GET by CORRELID with a wait interval. If the wait interval expires, the application would get a return code of 2033 and then issue a COMMIT before closing the thread. If the reply message is legitimately late for whatever reason, the COMMIT will have no effect. But if the message arrived and had been backed out and requeued, the COMMIT will cause it to stay in the Backout Queue.
One way to see exactly what is going on is to run a trace against the queue in question. You can use the built-in trace function - strmqtrc - which has a few more options in V7 than does the V6 version. However if you want very fine grained control you can use the trace exit in SupportPac MA0W. With MA0W you can see exactly what API calls are made by the program and those made on its behalf.
[EDIT] Updating the response with some info from the PMR:
The following is from the WMQ V7 Infocenter:
MessageConsumers are single threaded below the Session level, and
any requeuing of poison messages
takes place within the current unit of
work. This does not affect the
operation of the application, however
when poison messages are requeued
under a transacted or
Client_acknowledge Session, the
requeue action itself will not be
committed until the current unit of
work is committed by the application
code or, if appropriate, the
application container code."
Hence, if it is important for the customer to have poison messages
committed immediately after they are
backed out, it is recommended they
either make use of the Application
Server Facilities
(ConnectionConsumer) which can commit
the message immediately, or
another mechanism to move poison
messages from the queue.
Here is the link to this information in the V6 and V7 Information Centers. Since you are using the V6 client so you would want to refer to the V6 Infocenter. Note that with the V6 client, there is no mention in the Infocenter of ASF being able to commit the poison message immediately, even when using a ConnectionConsumer. The way I read it, this means you probably will need to upgrade to the V7 client to get the behavior you are looking for. Will be interested to see if the PMR results in a similar recommendation.

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