Archive for December, 2007

More on the Community experiment

As stated here, I removed the chatroom over Christmas, but will be reinstating it soon for registered users only. This means that there will (hopefully) not be any spam coming through and that usage can be tracked. Of course, no one who registers with the site will abuse it, since it is for Gen-interested users to gain contacts with other Gen-interested people. To register with the site, use the link at the top of the page (on the menu bar), or click here.

EDIT: Chat now restored here

Festive thanks

Many thanks to all those readers and contributors who have made Gentalk.biz a success in 2007!

Lets hope that 2008 will be even better for Gentalk.biz and the whole CA-gen community.

Eclipse roadmap

I read recently that the plan for Gen r8 (in the context of the Eclipse Technology) is that there will be a few diagrams offered (the ERD and new webView diagrams) initially, in order that the users get used to developing in the new interface. The existing interfaces will remain for the forseeable future.

I think that this is a good thing, since it offers the seasoned developer the option of “sticking with what he knows” and also the newbie (possibly coming from an environment where he has used Eclipse previously) will find that the learning curve is not so steep.

Of course, none of this is set in stone until Gen r8 goes GA! – it could all change – but for the moment it seems a sensible step – offering a choice of interfaces, introducing them slowly, over time.

Hopefully, though, if the Eclipse-based diagrams are a success, more will be rolled out over coming releases.

Can’t wait !!!

MQ & DB2 on HP-UX survey

Do you know of any CA Gen application running on HP-UX using  “CA Gen Middleware for MQ Series” ? 

There is only one company worldwide with a license for “CA Gen Middleware for MQ Series” on HP-UX.
CA would like to verify worldwide use before removing the option on HP-UX.
       

Do You know of any instance of DB2 on HP-UX?

The situation with MQ on HP-UX above has CA wondering if anyone is using DB2 on HP-UX. 
CA is planning to survey the entire Gen on HP-UX customer base about DB2 on HP-UX at a later date.

If your organisation either uses DB2 on HP-UX, or MQ on HP-UX, or you know of someone who does, then the EDGE User Group want to hear from you, such that a collaborative response can be sent to CA.

Please use the contact form below to give details, and they will be sent directly to EDGE. If you would rather not give your details to gentalk.biz, then contact EDGE directly at their website – either way, let’s help CA shape the future direction of the product.

Tuning AEFAD

When changing technologies, it’s all too easy to forget that those Asynchronous Daemon parameters that have been religiously tuned over the years need re-evaluating. This is especially true when changing database technology.

Take database connections, for example – each load module requires a connection to the database, but how long do those connections last, and how large are they – different load modules contain different numbers of open cursors, for example, leading to varying sizes of connections.

Does the -a parameter to AEFAD now hold true (this is the maximum number of load modules allowable per daemon) ?

The reason that this might be a bone of contention is that database connections require memory, and a change in technology will necessitate a recalculation of how much memory on the target database server is required. Reducing -a does indeed reduce the memory overhead, but at what cost ? Performance is usually the first thing to go here – additional paging and loading up of load modules as a result of a lower -a parameter.

Counteracting this may be a strategy to pre-load load modules into memory and lock them in, thus almost specifying the number of database connections required and thus the memory requried on the database server - but this also comes with an downside – if your application has more load modules than can be pre-loaded, then packaging needs to be changed to reduce the number of open connections – but again, at a development cost.

An invaluable tool in the tuner’s arsenal is aefc (see this post), but its no substitute for pre-thinking and performance and stress testing of a newly ported application.

Issues like re-planning the configuration of the Transaction Enabler are items on a porting project’s list that should probably come higher than they do, such that it is planned in from the start.

Gaining a DEEP understanding of the application and how it currently works is critical to the success of a porting project – allow time for this in any plan.