Collectives

A collective is a set of brokers that are fully interconnected and form part of a multi-broker network for publish/subscribe applications.

A broker cannot belong to more than one collective. Brokers within the same collective can exist on physically separate computers. However, a collective cannot span more than one broker domain.

Each pair of broker queue managers must be connected together by a pair of WebSphere MQ channels.

The following figure shows a simple collective of three brokers:

A collective of three brokers
A collective provides the following benefits:

When you create a collective, the workbench ensures that the connections that you make to other collectives and brokers are valid. You are prevented from making connections that would cause messages to cycle forever within the network. You are also prevented from creating a collective of brokers that does not have the required WebSphere MQ connections already defined.

The queue manager of each broker in a collective must connect to every other queue manager in the collective by a pair of WebSphere MQ channels.

Each broker in the collective maintains a list of its neighbors.

A neighbor can be one of the following:

The complete list of neighboring brokers forms a broker's neighborhood.

Related concepts
Brokers
Publish/subscribe topologies
Related tasks
Developing publish/subscribe applications