Question OE Management

[ron]

We have several 10.2B databases at a central office and about 250 others connected remotely. Most hosts are Linux (RH) - and some are SCO. Half the remote DBs are 9.1D - but are being migrated to 10.2B. All applications use character clients (we don't have an Appserver).

I know very little about OE Explorer and OE Management. I have Explorer working in a browser and my "first impression" is that it doesn't offer much.

My (limited) understanding is that Explorer is supplied along with OE DB licences - but Management requires an additional licence.

Before I go any further I'd like to know some opinions about whether people have found Explorer to be useful - and worth the trouble of setting it up. What do others think? Has anyone found Explorer useful (as distinct from "nice")? Anyone find Management useful? Is Management worth paying the extra for?

Cheers,
Ron.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

We use OEE for clients with a Windows back end. The UI is dated and unintuitive, it scatters DB configuration all over the place, and it is difficult and tiresome to transition OEE DB state to or from a .pf file. However, OEE and OEM are the most straightforward and (as far as I know) the only supported means of running a database broker in a service account. Running as a service is essential in my opinion as it avoids the situation where the DB shuts down because the user who proserved it logged off.

I don't have any clients running OEM at this point however that may change in the near future. I have played with it a little but really haven't used it in earnest so I can't help you much there.

I find it odd that you would consider a migration to 10.2B at this point in its life cycle. It is well into its mature phase and is on its last service pack. Are there specific reasons that would keep you from moving up to 11.3?

 

[ron]

Thanks for the comments, Rob.

Your point about rolling-out 10.2B is well-understood. I have pushed that barrow - but the decision is not mine to make. There are many balls in the air here right now - and the priority is to get off SCO/9.1D ASAP. The belief is that once all sites are RH/10.2B - the change to 11.x will be a lot easier.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I understand the motivation to get off 9.1D as soon as possible, and that this decision is not yours to make. But unless there are other unrevealed factors at work here, I believe doing a round of upgrades from 9.1D to 10.2B and then another from 10.2B to 11.3 will ultimately be more time-consuming and expensive than upgrading each site directly to 11.3.

Also, with the phased upgrade there is the danger that after phase one, someone in management will be tempted to say "Gosh, that was a lot of time and effort just to get to 10.2B, and we have other things to do as well. Well, now that we're on a supported release there's no rush to get to 11.3." And then a couple of years go by and you're back in the same boat.

 

[Cringer]

I completely agree with Rob, whilst I also understand your position, Ron. Ultimately though, moving straight to 11.3 is very little extra effort over and above just moving to 10.2.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Also, a direct upgrade avoids the unnecessary extra work of acquiring 10.2B licenses, installing it, and ultimately uninstalling it.

 

[TomBascom]

Personally, I despise OEE and OEM. Ugly, unintuitive and horrid to work with.

But, as Rob says, if you are on Windows you need to launch things as services.

But you do *NOT* need really to use OEE -- you /can/ edit properties files manually. In spite of all the scare stories it does work just fine. And you can use the dbman etc command line tools to start & stop databases etc.

I try to keep the properties files stuff to a bare minimum and then use a -pf file pointed to via "otherargs"

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I try to keep the properties files stuff to a bare minimum and then use a -pf file pointed to via "otherargs"

That's a good approach, I hadn't considered that.

With parameters specified multiple times, the last one wins. Do you know if otherargs is parsed last? In other words, will it override defaults that might otherwise be used if otherargs were left blank?

 

[TomBascom]

I haven't explicitly tested it lately but I'm pretty sure that otherargs goes last.

 

[ron]

Rob - I agree with you entirely. What you have said is almost exactly what I said myself about the matter! But ..... deaf ears, I guess.

Tom - thank you very much. I believe you have "quantified" OEE and OEM for me. I think I'll let them gather a bit more dust.

 

[cj_brandt]

We are 10.2B and linux / unix. We use OEE in some non prod environments and we use OEM in some prod environments.
We use app servers so OEE is a way to quickly make config changes to the app servers rather than use mergeprop. That is the only item we use it for.
We use OEM in prod for a few items. We use the dashboard to show basic server stats as a quick way to see how our prod servers are doing. We use the trend database to go back and review db stats when a user says - report xyz ran much slower last weekend than the weekend before. Having the db stats trended helps us to see what the bottleneck was.

OEE / OEM that ship with 10 are very basic tools, but they are all Progress provides. There are improvements in 11 and there will be more coming in the future.

 

[Chris Hughes]

My 2 pence (or should that be cents) worth

I spend most of my time these days around 10.2B - yea still waiting on 11.3 testing

You may have noticed when you ran the install that you get prompted for oe management foldes, thats because essentially the OEM and OEE use the same engine / interface - OEM allows you to click all the options that you currently find greyed out.

I would say if you currently use Progress Explorer (or your users / customers do) then you have to go to OEE as Progress explorer is depricated. I give customers a quick run through (green circles good - otherwise bad) and explain how to restart db's and view log files and what a couple of the parameters do. I'm not sure they ever use the interface though - because we also give them a stop all and start all batch file.

Also run the admin service as a windows service account - big + as mentioned earlier.

Part of my job is installing web services this we used to do through Progress Explorer so the natural migration to OEE works well.

Cheers