User Groups
Is your Progress User group looking for a great presentation? The sessions below are just some of the topics that Greenfield Technologies can offer to your users. To arrange for a presentation for your PUG contact Tom Bascom at: PUG Presentation
- ProTop -- An Open Source Progress Database Performance Monitor
- AJAX For Progress OpenEdge
- Progress Performance Tuning FAQ
- Favorite VST Tips, Tricks & Techniques for OpenEdge
- Highly Parallel Database Dump & Load
- 1001 Great Reasons to Upgrade Your Progress OpenEdge Database!
- Techniques for Investigating Suspicious Progress 4GL Code
- Load Simulation for Everyone!
- Optimizing Progress Database Response Time
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ProTop -- An Open Source Progress Database Performance Monitor
ProTop is a free, Open Source database monitor for Progress OpenEdge databases. ProTop sorts, filters and groups realtime VST data into insightful analysis screens that help to keep your database and application performance in tip top shape. This session will examine ProTop's "out of the box" capabilities, architecture and the customization interface. We'll learn how to approach common monitoring problems through live demonstrations and explain how to get started on the road to proactively managing your database and application.
Outline
- Why do you need a database monitor?
- Monitoring alternatives. (PROMON, Fathom, Glance, TOPAS, etc...)
- ProTop Architecture
- Platforms (UNIX Character, Windows GUI)
- Publish & Subscribe Messaging
- What can ProTop do for you?
- Summary Data
- Blocked Clients & Open Transactions
- Table and Index Activity
- User Activity
- Estimating Big B
- Latches and Resources
- Clients and Servers
- Balancing IO
- Storage Area & Extent Capacity
- Alerts, Alarms and Data Capture
- Using ProTop in Development & Test Environments
- Customizing ProTop
- Beyond ProTop
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AJAX for Progress OpenEdge
AJAX is the hottest buzzword in application development today. AJAX is also a technology that you can easily apply to your own applications. Learn how you can AJAX-enable any version of Progress to produce rich bowser-based GUI's without binding yourself to the whims of Redmond while leveraging your investment in Progress 4GL business logic. We will learn how through live demonstrations and sample code that you can immediately put to use on your own systems.
Outline
- What is AJAX?
- When is AJAX appropriate?
- Is this a "clean sheet of paper" technology?
- Must I use XML?
- Asynchronous or Synchronous?
- How "rich" is "rich"?
- The Plumbing
- The Client
- AJAX Server
- Application Services
- Demo Application
- A Basic Transaction
- A Rich UI
- AJAX Challenges
- Resources
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Progress Performance Tuning FAQ
In this session we will cover the most frequently asked (or in some cases the "should have been asked!") questions about Progress OpenEdge database tuning. We will cover which parameters and configuration options have the greatest impact on your database and show you how to quickly get your system in shape and impress users!
Outline
- A Quick Explanation of Performance Tuning
- Don't Argue, Just Do This!
- Top 10 List!
- Performance Tuning Challenges
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Favorite VST Tips, Tricks & Techniques for OpenEdge
Learn how to winnow the wheat from the chaff, go beyond superficially browsing VSTs and dig into realtime VST data for insight that will keep your database and application in tip top shape. This session will explore topics such as "how many (and which) bi clusters are in use?", "who are the most active users?", "what are they doing?", "who holds the record lock?" and "who else is waiting for it?". We'll learn how to resolve these, and many other questions that require digging deeply into VST's, through live demonstrations and sample code that you can immediately put to use on your own systems.
Outline
- A Quick Explanation of VSTs
- VST Quirks and Challenges
- Favorite Tips & Tricks:
- Important Summary Data
- Table Activity
- Index Activity
- User Activity
- Estimating Big B
- Blocked Clients
- Record Locks
- Resources and Latches
- Open Transactions
- BI Cluster Utilization
- Remote Clients and Servers
- Storage Area & Extent Activity
- New VSTs in OpenEdge 10.1
- Future Directions
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Highly Parallel Database Dump & Load
Migrating to a new release of OpenEdge doesn't require a dump and load of your database but getting the maximum benefit from new features often does. In this session we will highlight OpenEdge Database features that benefit from a dump and load, cover several alternative approaches to D&L and then develop a specific process for migrating databases in a highly parallelized manner that takes maximum advantage of machine resources. This session will include live demonstrations and take-away code that you can immediately put to use migrating and upgrading your own systems.
Outline
- Why Dump and Load?
- What methods are available?
- Methods
- Pros & Cons
- Considerations (when is one better than another?)
- Using A Highly Parallel Approach
- When to use it
- When not to use it
- Brief case studies
- Planning
- Plumbing outline
- Code walk through
- Configuration
- Testing & Validation
- Demo! Yes, really :-)
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1001 Great Reasons to Upgrade Your Progress OpenEdge Database!
Is your application taking advantage of all that the Progress OpenEdge database has to offer? Not if it isn't running on a current release! Every application can benefit from a database upgrade and every release of Progress has significant new features that are beneficial to the entire spectrum of Progress customers. You don't need to have the latest whiz-bang user interface nor do you need to have The World's Largest Database in order to benefit from an upgrade. Come to this session to get the lowdown on which features really matter and why. We'll even share apples to apples benchmarking data comparing versions 9 & 10 on identical hardware performing identical tasks.
Outline
- Just How Old Is Version 9? (or 6, 7 & 8 for that matter...)
- OE10 was released when?
- What is the major feature timeline? (and how do they help?)
- -spin
- APWs
- Size of -B
- Block Sizes
- Rows Per Block
- Storage Areas
- Data Clusters
- Upgrade Traps and Pitfalls
- Apples to apples impact of features
- What about oranges? (upgrade the HW too...)
- But I'm:
- a small database
- a small user count
- an orphaned application
- on an orphaned platform
- "If it's not broken don't fix it" can be a very expensive proposition.
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Techniques for Investigating Suspicious Progress 4GL Code
The most intransigent performance problems are application coding issues. These problems are often far more difficult and expensive to diagnose and cure than hardware or database & operating system tuning problems.
By using the tools and techniques presented in this session to target real problems rather than chasing phantoms and to validate proposed solutions before implementation you can take the guesswork out of the equation and produce dependable production improvements.
Outline
- The Effects of Poor Queries
- Finding "Likely Suspects"
- Tools and Techniques for Addressing the Problem
- Measuring Query Efficiency
- A Query Testbed
- Using The Profiler
- Examples & Demonstration
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Load Simulation for Everyone!
One of the challenges of managing complex systems is determining how they will behave as changes are being made. Changes in user load, changes in hardware, and changes in application 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."
This session will present a simple and effective approach to simulating a realistic work load and tools for doing the same that can bring this complexity under control. No costly testing tools required!
Outline
- The Challenge of Complexity
- Why Simulate?
- Finding the Limits
- Capacity Planning
- Root Cause Analysis
- Minimizing Cost
- Optimizing Available Resources
- QoS Assurances
- Considerations of Fidelity
- Covering the bases...
- Characterizing the load...
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- How do we realistically drive them?
- Users are fickle...
- Building and Controlling a Simulation Environment
- You already have everything that you need...
- A generic load driver
- Tuning the driver to your load
- Controlling test runs
- Reading the Tea Leaves (Monitoring the Results)
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Optimizing Progress Database Response Time
Most approaches to database tuning used today are fundamentally flawed. They consist of tips and techniques rather than method -- the conventional method can be summed up as "trial and error". This session will describe the important characteristics of a better method, show how that method is applied to Progress databases and explain how you can achieve any desired hit ratio. (That last bit is tongue in cheek -- you'll appreciate the humor by the end of the session!)
Outline
- Today's Method
- Why Doesn't it Work?
- What are the Characteristicss of a Good Method?
- The Wrong Improvement Activities
- Performing the Right Improvement Activities
- What is Response Time?
- A Better Method
- Overcoming Obstacles and Objections
- Selecting Appropriate User Actions
- Collecting the Right Data
- Forecasting Payoff