The OpenEdge DBA Files

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.

Three customers: two new, one existing. Same problem: my OpenEdge environment is SLOW! They had been searching for the root cause and running out of ideas, so they called for help.

Case #1

3 weeks ago we received a call from a company having performance issues following a double update: Progress OpenEdge 11.6 to 11.7.9, Windows 2016 to Windows 2019. Ok… this is quite straightforward, what’s the problem? Everything is slower since the update. A report takes 5 to 6 minutes instead of 2.

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.

There are a lot of metrics that “everyone knows” you should be paying attention to. But much like “common sense”, it sure would be nice if more people knew about these metrics and why you should pay attention to them!

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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.