Force MSDTC to orphan a SQLServer distributed transaction

Question

When shutting down my project's WebSphere-based JavaEE application, distributed transactions are sometimes left alive in the SQLServer 2005 database. These retain their locks forever and must be killed manually. They are described generally in this very good article.

The article talks about how the transaction coordinator is unable to co-ordinate the distributed transaction participants and so flags the transaction with a process ID of -2.

Given that we get this issue infrequently, but that it always happens when we shut down the application, I am not convinced it is a failure of the MSDTC. It is more likely to have something to do with WebSphere and how it terminates applications.

I would like to test it. But I cannot reliably make it happen.

Is there any way to force the MSDTC to orphan a SQLServer distributed transaction?

Answer 1

My question was misleading, because I wasn't quite sure what the problem actually was. I suspect MSDTC is assisting WebSphere in transacting with MQ and SQLServer. The problem occurs when we perform an unclean shutdown of the WAS server and the vendor-provided part of our application tries to do some sort of cleanup and fails.

I suspect this question is not helpful to anyone else (unless they are using the Misys Message Manager in WebSphere on Windows) so apologies, dear reader, for wasting your time.