Oracle Coherence Upgrades End-to-End Data, Transaction Integrity 
Oracle’s latest upgrade to its Coherence in-memory distributed data grid solution sports new features to boost end-to-end reliability of traffic and transactions, including to and from J2EE to .NET and even the cloud. IDN goes in-depth about Coherence 3.6 with Oracle vice president for development Cameron Purdy.
Oracle’s latest upgrade to its Coherence in-memory distributed data grid solution sports new features to boost end-to-end reliability of traffic and transactions, including to and from J2EE to .NET and even the cloud.
Coherence is a JCache-compliant in-memory distributed data grid that can automatically and dynamically partition data in-memory across multiple servers. It lets customers push data closer to the application for faster access, more agile scalability, continuous data availability and transactional integrity. 
“You can’t afford to lose data or suffer downtime, and Coherence 3.6 continues to build on this theme with investments we’ve made in many end-to-end features,” Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle Coherence told Integration Developer News.
In specific, Purdy said, Coherence 3.6 adds ability to support exact reporting against live transactional data. “Predictability and scalability comes from our new XA support for distributed 2 phase-commit transactions,” he added. The support maintains transaction integrity and data synchronization across Oracle DB and MQ Series. It can also provide admins a single transaction control for multiple transactions.
Adding Broad Integrity Support for .NET
Coherence 3.6 also has features to better end-to-end integrity between J2EE and Microsoft .NET systems.
“We’ve focused a lot on transaction integrity outside the Oracle environment, because we know the data and transaction integrity is ‘all or nothing’,” Purdy said. “So we’ve focused on support for very large-scale session management for the Microsoft .NET space,” Purdy told IDN.
“In effect, Coherence is acting as a data grid backing up .NET. [Coherence’s] new transaction framework and the session provider for .NET extend the benefits of Coherence to a broader base of developers and to organizations with Windows-based applications," Purdy said. The add-on features come at customer requests, he added.
The Coherence Session Provider for the Microsoft .NET Framework supports session management for Microsoft .NET framework-based applications.
Under the covers, Coherence 3.6 takes the product’s current session management for JavaEE and implements it for ASP.NET. “So not only do we support all [Oracle’s] Java competitors but we now also have support for .NET applications. So, now for the first time, ASP.NET has a scalable, concurrent and highly-available session store,” Purdy said.
“You can’t afford to lose data or suffer downtime, and Coherence 3.6 continues to build on this theme with investments we’ve made in many end-to-end features...”
Cameron Purdy
VP development
Oracle Corp.
Another Microsoft-friendly feature is Coherence Query Language (CohQL), a SQL-like query language to increase developer productivity, allowing devs to use query syntax rather than programming languages to manage and use Coherence. The SQL-like syntax works for both dev and operations teams.
SSL Security, Cloud Play Role in
Coherence’s End-to-End Integrity Vision
Coherence 3.6’s end-to-end upgrade also includes new high-end encryption support for end-to-end Java NIO-based SSL encryption across partitions and caches. This feature helps provide atomic transaction guarantees and continuous operation, even in the event of a client or server failure, Purdy told IDN.
With Coherence 3.6 we’re using end to end SSL support all the way to .NET and data center and through the clusters -- all of that can now be protected with SSL,” he said.
With Coherence Quorums, Oracle even extends Coherence to cloud environments. Quorum allows users to specify the behavior of individual Services (including Proxy, Cache and Cluster services) during cluster membership changes. Further, because Quorums allow users to specify the minimum number of service members that are required before actions on the service is allowed (or disallowed), it provides greater control of capacity and resource management in grid and cloud environments, Oracle said.
Coherence 3.6 continues to build on the same core architecture which provides replicated and distributed (partitioned) data management and caching services on top of a reliable, highly scalable peer-to-peer clustering protocol.
It has no single points of failure, and automatically and transparently fails over and redistributes its clustered data management services when a server becomes inoperative or is disconnected from the network.
When a new server is added, or when a failed server is restarted, it automatically joins the cluster and Coherence fails back services to it, transparently redistributing the cluster load. Coherence includes network-level fault tolerance features and transparent soft re-start capability to enable servers to self-heal.
Oracle has also increased Coherence engineering resources.
“We’ve invested and grown the [Coherence] team within Oracle," since the last release, Purdy told IDN, including the internal development and customer support groups.
