Message-driven scheduling of IMS BMP/JBP regions

Actually IMS allows no efficient processing of bulk workloads that are hitting the system at unpredictable points in time. When houndreds or thousands of messages for a specific IMS program have to be processed at a point in time batch processing is much more efficient than transaction processing. But the problem with batch processing these workloads is, that you have to have the BMP/JBP active all the time or you have to schedule it every few minutes, because you are not able to predict when such a workload will hit the system. In the case it runs all the time it holds resources all the time and it is not easy to monitor whether the batch application is still behaving correctly or not. The problem with scheduling it every few minutes is that you will do the program initialization a lot of times when no workload is there to process (which costs you money without having any value for it) and in the case the bulk workload has hitten the system it might take some minutes until the BMP/JBP is scheduled again (which means that you will have a longer queuing).

A solution for such very common bulk workloads would be an option for an IMS-controlled scheduling of message-driven BMPs/JBPs. This would be helpful for both IMS Connect- and MQ-based BMPs/JBPs. In the case of MQ-based workloads this would mean to trigger a BMP/JBP.

This would be even better when the message-driven BMP/JBP would not have to do a checkpoint for every message that is processed and IMS would be able to re-enqueue messages that could not be processed successfully since the last checkpoint was done when doing a checkpoint restart of such a message-driven BMP/JBP.

Especially for fast processed workloads some kind of delay might be necessary to first await enough of this bulk messages or to wait for the last message to be queued (for instance by n seconds delayed scheduling, scheduling after n messages have been queued or a n second wait on an insuccessful message GU before termination – the last proposal might be the easiest manageable one).