Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Programming Interfaces

Creating schema cache files

When OpenEdge starts a client application, it loads the schema for each database that the application requires into memory. Ordinarily, Progress reads the schema from the database, which can be on a remote server. If the network is slow, or the server, itself, is overloaded, this can increase startup time significantly.

You can shorten client startup time by building and saving a schema cache file on a disk local to the client. A schema cache file is a machine-portable binary file containing a complete schema or subschema for a single OpenEdge database. When you start a client application with local schema cache files, Progress reads the required schema for each database almost instantaneously from the local disk rather than waiting for network or server traffic.