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.

When you first get started supporting an OpenEdge system, there are some things that you really ought to know about your environment. That way, when there’s a problem somewhere down the road, even though “nothing changed”, you’ll have the information you need to show that yes, something did in fact change.

What’s the best tool to backup the database? Do I have to shut it down? What does Progress recommend? What do experienced DBAs use? Should I hang it up, hire a resume writer?

Unless it’s a read-only database, no OpenEdge production database should run without after-imaging. Period.

After-Imaging (AI) is an OpenEdge continuous change logging system that stores database changes in specially formatted log files. It allows the DBA to restore a database from a backup then apply all changes from the end point of the backup to the point of the last AI archived change. AI is required to:

“It’s slow.” If you want to see a DBA’s eyes roll to the back of his head, utter the words “it’s slow”. What, exactly, is slow? Seems it’s our job to find out.

Get the Facts

“It takes for-EVER to create an order!”

Friday. 11:00 AM. I get a phone call from a managed services provider who knows nothing about OpenEdge. Their customer had been down since around 5:00 AM and no one knew what to do. Oh, and by the way, this is version 8 on Windows.

Welcome to our first 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 issue, we’re going to start with some ProTop basics.

What’s the best tool to backup the database? Do I have to shut it down? What does Progress recommend? What do experienced DBAs use? Should I hang it up, hire a resume writer? Relax, the right answer came with the OpenEdge installation. Take a look:

What not to use and why

Hardware-based backups including OS backups, disk mirroring, “snapshots,” and third party tools are not the best way to back up the database as all of these require the database to be in a quiescent state. In order to get a snapshot of the database files, you have to shut down the DB server or use proquiet. Careful with proquiet: you need to wait until the “Quiet point has been enabled” message appears in the db.lg before proceeding.

Ahhh…Mike Tyson. You gotta love Mike Tyson. You, on the other hand, you are probably more like Marvis Frazier. I see the puzzled look on your face: no, not Smokin’ Joe Frazier, the first person to beat Muhammad Ali in 1971. I’m talking about Marvis Frazier, his son. Look it up: KO’d in 30 seconds. Nice uppercut in the first round. When people talk to me about their high availability measures, I think about Marvis Frazier. Good looking guy. He talked the talk and walked the walk, but when it came time to deliver, he failed. Twice. Most of your high availability planning is the same. It’s good enough to impress the 24-year-old junior auditor from Deloitte but will never deliver when you actually need it.

From Big Iron to a “Commodity Server”

In this real-life case study of the migration of a 1,500+ user system from Solaris to Linux, we examine the question of how large a user load a Linux Server can support.