Batch and Online Transaction Processing: Important Concepts and Terminology

The following table provides a brief introduction to the concepts and terminology related to user interfaces that are presented in this chapter.

Concept / term What it means
Batch job A program, for example, a report, that executes in background and is managed by a queue.
Database driver A Lawson program that supports communication between the Lawson Environment and an RDBMS.
Distributed batch environment UNIX and Windows only: Lawson components that support customers' ability to distribute batch processing across multiple machines.
Job Executor (execjob) Lawson component that manages batch processes.
Job Scheduler A table of jobs that tracks information about when they should execute.
LAJS (Lawson Batch Server) Lawson component that checks the Job Scheduler and sends messages to the Job Executor telling it when a job can be started.
LA-RTS (Lawson Runtime System)

A group of libraries and other files that have been tightly integrated with the Cobol / RPG vendor's runtime system to provide services that Lawson applications need at runtime.

(This document uses the term "LA-RTS" to refer to LACOBRTS, the Cobol runtime system, and LARPGRTS, the RPG runtime system.)

LATM (Lawson Application Server) A Lawson component that manages online transactions to reduce the demand on memory and improve performance.
Messaging and message queues Lawson transactions communicate through message queues. Message queues contain the current state of a transaction and the address in memory of a complete information about the transaction. (See "shared memory" in this table.)
RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) Lawson stores customer application data and Lawson metadata in a third-party, SQL-based database system.
Shared memory When transactions are initiated, a shared memory segment is allocated for the transaction. This segment contains full details about the transaction. Storing a full message in memory and sending only the current state through message queues improves transaction performance.
Single-server environment An environment in which all Lawson transactions occur on a single machine. This is the opposite of a distributed batch environment.
tcpexecjob and txpexecjobd UNIX only: Job Executors for remote distributed batch processing.