The OpenEdge DBA Files

We often get asked “what’s the magic go fast database parameter setting?” Nobody asks about the go slow settings.

The best way to avoid disasters is to learn from mistakes, preferably someone else’s. Memorize this series or polish your resume-writing skills!

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.

Database Administrator (DBA). Sounds important, doesn’t it?  But what are you supposed to do every day?

People often ask us: “what tasks should an OpenEdge DBA be performing? When? What should my daily, weekly, quarterly, etc. checklist have on it?”

In this video Tom describes how you can monitor very active sessions in your OpenEdge environment.

In the techie world, few things are as misunderstood as UNIX performance metrics. Grab a cup of coffee, sit down, and join me as I go over a few things.

Metrics shmetrics…what metrics?

There are many. Let’s start with a few CPU-related metrics, then we’ll tackle memory, disk, kernel, network and more in later blog posts.

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.

Many are the secret societies in the human race: the Knights Templar, The Masons, The Department of Motor Vehicles…all carry a rich history of secrets and rituals both mysterious and inscrutable. One of the most secretive of such groups is that of the OpenEdge Database Administrators. Follow us, and you too may join their ranks.

So many parameters – what do they mean? Which should I use? Which shouldn’t I use? What are the secret magic values?

Database Buffers (-B)

The DBA equivalent of buying flowers for your wife – more is better…to a point. You want it to be big enough to hold the “working set” of data: the orders, invoices, pick-lists, etc. that your business needs right now to function efficiently.

Poor transaction scope and BI growth: the evil twins conspiring to crash your database! Take our word for it…we know.

Sometimes it’s bad code, sometimes it’s bad luck, but either way, Tom shows you how to protect your business against the potentially disastrous effects of out-of-control transactions.

It all started on Monday evening when the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer decided to kill the database broker process, _mprosrv. Given the circumstances, it was suggested that we “just” reboot. “Just” is a four-letter word. Whenever you hear “just,” you should prepare yourself…

So we rebooted…

… and, of course, it took longer than expected. Forty-five minutes to shut down (mostly to “deactivate” swap), and then, since the server hadn’t been rebooted for 2 years, the filesystems needed another 45 minutes for an fsck. Ok, that was painful, but at least we have a nice clean system to restart the db.