Greenfield Technologies

Your Progress OpenEdge Database Expert

Articles

Tom Bascom has been working with Progress based systems since 1988 and has extensive experience with the Progress 4GL and OpenEdge Database.

Articles Tom has written on the subject of Progress 4GL development, database administration and general troubleshooting:

ProTop -- VST Based Progress Database Performance Monitor

ProTop is a Progress 4gl VST based database performance monitor program. ProTop monitors databases with an eye towards presenting the data more like the UNIX "top" program than PROMON does -- hence the name ;-)

How Fast Will It Go?

"How many records can my machine read per second?" The ultimate answer depends on a great many factors such as the amount of memory, the capabilities of the disk subsystem, the number of CPUs, their speed, type and configuration and the "other" workload on the machine. Many of these factors are highly variable and difficult to predict or simulate.

It is, however, possible to determine what the upper limit for a given box is under ideal circumstances. The readprobe.p tool is designed to determine what this limit is.

Traps and Kills, "Hung" Users, "Runaways" And Other Psychos

The simplest (and safest) way to handle _progres processes (self service user sessions) needing some sort of external attention is to do nothing.

If that isn't an option then in all cases your next step should be to have the user slowly back away from the keyboard keeping their hands in sight at all times.

Some Surprising Benefits Of Using Storage Areas

Progress Storage Areas are usually viewed as an administrative tool rather than as a means for directly improving performance. Faster and more selective index rebuild and dump/load, the ability to easily drop "temp areas", running dbanalys much more quickly and other benefits are all great reasons to use storage areas. Less well known is that many of the same factors that enable improved manageability also impact performance in interesting ways.

Debugging Progress 4GL Character Sessions

Progress rolled out a powerful upgrade to the 4gl debugger in the 9.1d05 service pack. Unfortunately most of the documentation and demos of the new debugger concentrate on using it within the context of a Windows PC -- leaving the impression that it is only usable in those environments. However, one of the most powerful and useful features of this new debugger is its ability to attach to and debug a remote process -- including the capability of debugging UNIX character sessions.

The debugger GUI is a Java program and can be run on either a Windows PC or in an X Windows session. You do not need to have a Windows PC to run the debugger.

OpenEdge Database VST Wish List

VSTs are one of the most useful tools that Progress has introduced in recent years. Even so there are many opportunities for improving their usefulness still further. We really do need better ways to analyze the problem of what a client session is doing to cause an issue in the database -- this is a huge problem in the field and it's only getting worse as OpenEdge supports larger and larger deployments. There are a number of additional specific suggestions in this document -- some might even be simple enough to implement prior to OpenEdge 10.0b. Others may take more effort.

Join me at Exchange 2004 in Las Vegas as hordes of Progress DBAs wheedle The Engine Crew at every opportunity to get these important enhancements into the very next release of Progress!

Investigating Suspicious Code

This article discusses several tools that can be used to make better decisions about application performance. The sample code is intended to be used with a simple ChUI application - that keeps it simple and compact.

Tuning -mmax

Many people know that temporary file operations can cause a considerable amount of IO in a Progress based application. This IO can have a serious impact on an application's performance.

Monitoring Your Progress Database's Performance

Everyone should always have some basic performance logging running on their production machines. Even something as simple as this PROMON screen scraper (based on the sample from "A DBA's Guide to Databases Under Linux" ) is priceless when trying to track down Progress database performance problems.

Load Simulation for Everyone

One of the most significant challenges of managing complex systems is determining how the system will behave as changes are being made. Changes in the business environment, the user load, hardware and software; changes to the schema or configuration of the database and even small and seemingly innocuous changes to tunable parameters all have enormous potential for unexpected (and decidedly negative) consequences. Properly testing the impact of such changes is often seen as "too complex" or "too expensive."

Articles Tom has written on other subjects:

Buy or Build?

If you've been to a trade show or heard a sales presentation lately, then you know that every piece of software ever written is easy to use, flexible and will solve all of your business problems right out of the box. And if you read the computer media you know that there is a seemingly endless parade of tools which allow anyone to build a complete solution to any business problem, no matter how complex, in a single afternoon. So should you buy? or build?