The OpenEdge DBA Files

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.

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!