Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
New and Revised Features

RDBMS

Release 10.1A includes the following enhancements to the OpenEdge® RDBMS.

Utility enhancements for increased performance and online availability

The following utility enhancements improve system availability by either removing the need to take the database offline to perform maintenance, or by increasing the performance of the utility, thus reducing the amount of time a database must be offline. Specific changes include:

Binary Dump — PROUTIL DUMP is enhanced to work against an online database and is multi-threaded to improve performance.
Binary Load — PROUTIL LOAD is enhanced to accept as input a list of binary dump files generated by a multi-threaded binary dump.
Index Rebuild — PROUTIL IDXBUILD is multi-threaded to improve performance.
Online Index Activation — PROUTIL IDXACTIVATE enables you to activate an inactive index while your database is online.
Database structure maintenance — PROSTRCT is enhanced with online availability and improved error checking:
PROSTRCT STATISTICS can be run against an online database. The output provides a snapshot of the database at the time the command is run.
PROSTRCT ADDONLINE allows you to add extents to an online database.
The -validate option to PROSTRCT ADD, PROSTRCT ADDONLINE, and PROSTRCT CREATE allows you to verify the syntax of your structure file, and to confirm with your operating system that sufficient disk space is available to create the extents defined in your structure file, before you execute the command.
Log file truncation — PROLOG is enhanced with a -online option that enables you to truncate a log file while the database is online.
PROQUIET without locking — PROQUIET is enhanced with a nolock qualifier to the enable option that enables you to quiet the database without waiting for shared memory latches.

Auditing support

As part of the OpenEdge core business services strategy, this release incudes auditing to provide an efficient and scalable mechanism to produce an audit trail of access to an application’s operations and data. For a complete overview of the auditing features, see the "Auditing" section. New database utilities in support of auditing include:

Enabling auditing — PROUTIL ENABLEAUDITING creates the auditing metaschema tables for audit policies, events, and data for the database, and sets the appropriate flags that direct the database to audit events according to the defined policies.
Disabling auditing — PROUTIL DISABLEAUDITING clears the flags that direct the database to audit events. Once auditing is disabled, no new events are audited. No existing audit data is deleted.
Archiving audit data — PROUTIL AUDITARCHIVE provides the ability to archive audit data in a binary file and to delete audit data from your database.
Loading audit data — PROUTIL AUDITLOAD provides the ability to load data archived by PROUTIL AUDITARCHIVE into a database, typically a long-term storage database.

Database utility user security

In support of auditing, all database utilities that can operate on audit data or policies must have controlled access through user identity and granted privileges.

After-image file management

This release includes a new utility, the AI File Management Utility, that provides customers with a best-practice approach to managing after-image extents. The utility archives FULL AI extents to a user-specified location, maintains a log file to aid in ROLL FORWARD, and is tightly integrated with Fathom Replication. AI File Management has two modes: automatic and manual. The automatic mode allows users with little or no experience with after imaging to quickly get started and the utility handles AI extent archival for you. In the manual mode, the knowledgeable user has greater control over the process of archiving AI extents.

JTA Support

The OpenEdge SQL Engine is enhanced to support the Java Transaction API (JTA) of the J2EE framework architecture. Support for JTA enables the OpenEdge database to participate in distributed SQL transactions. With distributed JTA transactions, the OpenEdge database takes the role of the resource manager in the J2EE framework, and relies on an external transaction manager to coordinate the commit or rollback of the distributed transactions.

Log file format

The format of each entry in the database log file provides detailed information about the time the event occurred, the source of the event, the message number, and the text of the associated message. With the exception of message text, the database log entry is formatted in fixed-width fields. The fields include: full date and time, process and thread ids, severity level, the user name and number, the message number, and the message text.

Saving key database events

The database is enhanced to optionally enable the logging of key events within the database. Key events, which were previously exclusively recorded in the database log file, are retrieved from the log file and stored within the database. Saving key events in the database prevents the loss of information when a database log file is truncated.

Updated startup parameters for improved performance

In Release 10.1A, the following startup parameters have new default values as indicated:

After-image Buffers (-aibufs) — The multi-user default value is now 20.
Blocks in Database Buffers (-B) — The default value is the maximum value of 3000 and 8*users.
Before-image Buffers (-bibufs) — The multi-user default value is now 20.
Number of Buffers for Temporary Tables (-Bt) — The single-user and multi-user default value is now 255.
Semaphore Sets (-semsets) — The multi-user default value is now 3.
Spin Lock Retries (-spin) — The multi-user default value is 10,000 for single CPU systems and 6000*# of CPUs for multi-CPU systems.

For more information on the database enhancements in this release, see:

Manuals:	OpenEdge Data Management: Database Administration OpenEdge Getting Started: Core Business Services
Web papers:	Archiving and Loading Audit Data Saving Key Database Events Enhanced Utility Security