What is an Enclave?

If you are a DB2 professional dealing with distributed workload… or if you are enabling zIIP specialty processors… chances are you’ve heard the term “enclave” or “enclave SRB.” But just what is an enclave?

An enclave is a construct that represents a transaction or unit of work. Enclaves are a method of managing mainframe transactions for non-traditional workloads. You can think of an enclave as an anchor point for resource accumulation regardless of where the transaction is executing.

With traditional workloads it is relatively easy to map the resources consumed to the actual transaction doing the consumption. But with non-traditional workloads – web transactions, distributed processing, etc. – it is more difficult because the transaction can span platforms. Enclaves are used to overcome this difficulty by correlating closely to the end user’s view of the transaction.

So even though a non-traditional transaction can comprise multiple “pieces” spanning many server address spaces, and can share those address spaces with other transactions, the enclave gives you more effective control over the non-traditional workload.

If you are interested in more details on enclaves and how they are managed, read through Enclaves – Managing Business Transactions from IBM’s RMF Newsletter.