Question stcreate for v11?

[Cringer]

Does anyone have a version of stcreate that works for v11 databases?

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

What is stcreate?

 

[Cringer]

It's a piece of code that trawls through a dbanalys output, combines it with your database .df and puts out it's best guess as to which areas you should be putting your tables based on rows per block (and other criteria). It's not perfect, but it gives a good starting point. Sadly, it doesn't work for a v11 dbanalys because of all the multi-tenancy changes.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Hmm. Never heard of it. I'd still rather do it manually; I enjoy structure design. And I also incorporate CRUD stats where possible, so dbanalys parsing isn't enough.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

V11 changed dbanalys output a little bit, but changing your program shouldn't take too much effort, assuming you aren't actually using multi-tenant tables. And if you are then you definitely don't want to do structure design programmatically.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

While I agree with you Rob that one would not want to do the physical database design completely automatically a tool that would assist you might come in handy, especially when you have to deal with a database that hosts 50+ applications with 2000+ tables.

Due to the lack of such a tool I developed one myself in V9. Come OE10 I had to adapt the tool because Progress changed the format of the dbanalysis output and introduced line breaks. Now it seems to me that I have to do the same work with OE11 again.

The whole report is solely designed to be human readalbe - but not designed to be parsed easily. What I really don't understand is, that Progress doesn't provide such a report in a form - for example XML - that you could easily parse, since the don't provide any support otherwise.

I don't think it is a good thing forcing everybody to have to roll his/her own. One could even think about an option to have the dbanalysis automatically imported into schema tables - but this is just thinking out loud ...

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[Cringer]

Thanks everyone. Going with my own parser for now because amending stcreate.p is proving to be too much work.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

The whole report is solely designed to be human readalbe - but not designed to be parsed easily. What I really don't understand is, that Progress doesn't provide such a report in a form - for example XML - that you could easily parse, since the don't provide any support otherwise. I don't think it is a good thing forcing everybody to have to roll his/her own.

I've asked more than once at Progress info exchanges for a parseable output option, like CSV; even just for the record block summaries rather than the whole report. Progress doesn't seem to get it. Some people there seem very married to the idea that "we're the platform people; you want tools, you make 'em". Another example is compile xref, where they give you unstructured data but no way of working with it. I know there's also an XML option in that case, but there's still no tool. So there are dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of one-off solutions around the world for parsing it. That development money would be better spent on creating revenue-generating Progress-based software.

One could even think about an option to have the dbanalysis automatically imported into schema tables - but this is just thinking out loud ...

I'd like that too. But in that case we don't have to wait for Progress. Now that I think about it, I could always add a tabanalys table to my application schema. And I already have code for parsing the tabanalys/dbanalys record data. I would just need a program to wrap proutil, capture the output, and load it into the table. Then I (or preferably, someone with coding talent ) could report on it and do trending and capacity planning.

 

[RealHeavyDude]

Couldn't agree more with you Rob.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.

 

[TomBascom]

FWIW -- a little birdie asked for my input on the topic of "CSV" output of the data a little while ago. I think we might actually see something some day.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Now that's encouraging news. Unfortunately there's no info exchange session at Exchange this year. I hope the "birdies" heed your advice, and soon...

 

[TomBascom]

Unfortunately there's no info exchange session at Exchange this year.

You'd almost think that they're missing the point. Or something.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

You'd almost think that they're missing the point. Or something.

Going OT, but...

At PCA 2013 I got what, 13 sessions and a workshop? At Exchange 2013, for quite a bit more money, I'll get 6 technical sessions and 2 workshops, not including the buzzword bingo keynote sessions.