Shadowbase Development News
John R. Hoffmann
Sr. Manager of
Shadowbase
Development
In 2014, Shadowbase Development and Delivery is focused on three major areas of development. We are, as always, continuing to enhance our core HP NonStop replication engine with new features, usability enhancements, and performance optimizations. We are investing heavily in NonStop Shadowbase ZDL, our new synchronous replication functionality. And for our Open Server customers, we are continuing to enhance Shadowbase for Open Servers (SBOS) software. Here, the focus will be on moving from our current implementation for source data collection that is trigger-based to using the host database’s transaction logs. The first database being converted is Oracle, followed by DB2.
Both the NonStop and Shadowbase for Open Server Release 5.010 are now generally available.
Contact Shadowbase Support for more information.
Some highlights of the new Shadowbase NonStop Release 5.010 include:
- Shadowbase UNDO has been extended to handle NonStop SQL/MX tables as well as NonStop Enscribe and SQL/MP tables.
Shadowbase UNDO allows changes to a file or table to be rolled back, leaving the file or table in its original state as of some user defined point prior to the roll-back. This feature is very useful when an application bug corrupts part of a database or an operator accidentally re-runs a job that causes file/table data corruption.
- A new mode of replication for Enscribe Entry-Sequenced files is added. NonStop Shadowbase replication can now optionally replicate Enscribe Entry-Sequenced files using unstructured access to allow exact replication of source to target Enscribe Entry-Sequenced files. (Shadowbase technology builds the data blocks in memory and flushes them to disk to preserve the data block formats and record ‘key’ values/positioning.)
- Shadowbase DDL Replication is extended to include SQL/MP tables and has been significantly enhanced to provide both better performance and coordination on the target system.
- Shadowbase FetchSource processing is extended to include Enscribe files. For NonStop TMF compressed UPDATE audit events, this feature retrieves the missing parts of the UPDATE event from the source record or row image.
- Shadowbase Enscribe Compare is enhanced to further reduce false positives by re-reading mismatched records on the target system to help account for replication latency delay.
- SOLV Loading is extended to include SQL/MX source tables with the new SOLVMX program.
- All Shadowbase software is enhanced to support SQL/MX versions through SQL/MX version 3.2.1
Some highlights of the new Shadowbase Open Server (SBOS) Release 5.010 include:
- Shadowbase for Open Systems includes a new option that allows log messages to be collected in a DOC and replicated to other systems. This functionality, coupled with a user-exit available from Shadowbase support, allows SBOS logs to be replicated to an HP NonStop system, and sent to EMS to facilitate central monitoring of all Shadowbase environments, regardless of the platform they are running on.
- SBPERF, a communications performance analyzer, now ships with Shadowbase for Open Systems install packages.
- Shadowbase ON ERROR processing is significantly enhanced, providing much more flexibility in handling errors by configuration and significantly reducing the need for user exits.
- Shadowbase for Open Systems now supports replication to Teradata databases.
- Replication to DB2 target databases is extended to additional operating systems and no longer requires ODBC drivers. Contact Shadowbase Support for more information on supported platforms.
- Shadowbase for Open Systems now supports 64 bit source collection for Microsoft SQL Server.
Our first synchronous replication product, Shadowbase ZDL, for HP NonStop environments, is currently undergoing beta testing with one of our customers. This beta release is a major milestone towards avoiding any data loss even in the event of catastrophic data center failure, and is a stepping stone to providing collision avoidance in active/active architectures.
We are planning a Controlled Availability FCS Release later this year that will build upon the results of the beta testing to allow uni-directional, NonStop to NonStop replication, in production, with zero committed data loss. Please contact Shadowbase Sales at [email protected] for more information about this exciting new product from Gravic.
Shadowbase Development is currently working on our next Shadowbase NonStop Release, 6.000. This release will be available in mid to late 2014 and has several significant enhancements:
- Large row replication: internal limits are increased to allow for the new, large row sizes for SQL/MX and Enscribe. The increased limits will also improve communication performance by reducing message overhead.
- Shadowbase Audit Log (SAL) is being added to Enscribe, for HP NonStop environments without a SQL license. This new feature allows audit information to be selected and stored in a log file for later analysis.
We are currently working towards a second quarter 2014 target for our Shadowbase Open Server Release 6.000 product, with the following enhancements:
- Batching Transactions: Batching transactions can provide a significant performance improvement by replaying multiple (source-committed) transactions under a single transaction on the target. For small, OLTP transactions, commit time can be a significant portion of the overall transaction replay time. By replaying multiple transactions under a single transaction on the target system, the time waiting for commits can be reduced and the overall replication throughput significantly increased.
- Oracle Log Source Replication: We are adding the ability to replicate from Oracle using Oracle’s transaction logs, giving you the choice of using either our existing trigger-based replication solution (faster access to replicated events) or the new log source replication solution (decouples the replication engine from the application database interaction).
- Larger Message Sizes: We are also extending the message sizes to 64k to improve overall throughput and to support longer row sizes.
As always, please keep us abreast of your future technology direction, needs, and wants in the data replication, data integration, and data synchronization space so we can plan to meet them accordingly.
Please reference our Newsletter Disclaimer.