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.

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.

Are you using fixed length extents in your OpenEdge database? What happens if they fill? Will anybody notice?

We got a call from a company that had been trying for months to find out how, where and why their system was slow. They had already spent thousands of dollars with system and OpenEdge consultants, all to no avail. ProTop found and reported the root cause in the first hour.

First thing first: record statistics

As we always do (and so should you!), we installed and configured ProTop to record as many statistics as possible for Progress and the operating system. As the first data points were coming in to the web portal, ProTop was already showing a few things worth digging into. (Quick note: most of the data shown below are available in the free version of ProTop, but this was a paid services engagement so some of the data and graphs shown below were provided by the commercial version of ProTop).

The -hash parameter is one of those little-known, often misunderstood parameters that can cause you a LOT of pain if set incorrectly. Trust us, we’ve seen it kill performance on numerous occasions!

Check out the video below and JC’s blog post “The Smoking Gun” (2021-07-05) where he talks about a real-world production environment where they just couldn’t figure out why performance was sooooo bad!

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.

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.