Anyone who has been around the OpenEdge world for a while has had to face the dreaded “User died holding shared memory latch. ABNORMAL SHUTDOWN” crash. While this sometimes happens as a result of a Progress OpenEdge bug, more often than not it’s a human error. Here are three key points to understand in order to minimize the chance of crashing your database when trying to terminate a shared memory client.

 

There’s a lot of data available to you via the OpenEdge database VSTs, but there’s more than just the VSTs.

OpenEdge Databases & SQL

Thinking about enabling SQL access to your OpenEdge database? Read this.

This post is part of the “New DBA Series.” Check blog.wss.com/for more posts in the series and other interesting DBA blog posts.

Here’s the first video in our Monitoring Series, aptly named “Why Monitor?”

Welcome to our monthly ProTop newsletter, where you’ll find out what’s new, tips and tricks and other cool ways to use both the free and commercial versions of ProTop.

In this month’s issue: Programmer Mode, and why every developer should have the free version of ProTop RT (Real Time) up on their screen when writing queries.

The only thing more dangerous than a curmudgeonly old DBA is a programmer.  No it’s not your imagination and yes they ARE out to get you!

 

“One Size Fits ALL” may be acceptable when talking about thong sandals or knit caps (it’s not entirely true even then). However, it is an obvious mistake when talking about bicycles, swimwear, and all manner of measures used in administering OpenEdge databases. That said, below is a list of metrics that can provide properly fitted insight into your database’s operational status.

Is the DB up?

Okay, so it’s not a number or a statistic, but it is certainly the most critical question. Along with this, who do the users call first? Is it you or somebody else? Know who’s going to get the call, and be sure they can always answer that question!

Welcome to our monthly ProTop newsletter, where you’ll find out what’s new, tips and tricks and other cool ways to use both the free and commercial versions of ProTop.

Today we’re releasing the latest version of ProTop, so read on to find out about some cool new features in pt3.14159.

Believe it or not, we use a whole bunch of tools in addition to ProTop when analyzing performance issues. This video series will highlight a few of them, starting with the original and always timeless promon.

No one wants to think about a database crash, and even less about losing data, and yet every month or two I get a call from an IT Director in exactly that situation. Their OpenEdge system has been down for hours and stays down for hours more while we do our best to perform emergency surgery. In the end the customer is left with a stitched up database and a post-mortem that reveals that all this could have been avoided if they had simply followed the advice in this blog and protected their OpenEdge database with after-imaging.

Protecting against lost data

Data protection is comprised of two equally important components: backups and after-image archives. Almost everyone understands backups: if there’s a problem, they get you 95% of your data back, up until the time of the last backup. After-image archives get you down that last mile, containing the detailed changes that were applied to your database. Think of them as a recording that you can play back (we call this “rolling forward”) on top of your restored DB. All the recorded changes are applied to the restored database in the same way as they were done the first time around.