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.
Clients that share common topics can connect to brokers within a collective. The common publications are transported efficiently within the collective, because they pass through only brokers that have at least one client with an interest in those common topics.
The performance of a client application is also improved for other services that are requested from this broker, or from this broker's queue manager. A client application can use both publish/subscribe and point-to-point messaging.
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.