Shadowbase Development News

John R. Hoffmann
Sr. Manager of
Shadowbase Development

Latest Release Highlights

Shadowbase Development has just completed work on General Availability (GA) releases for both HPE NonStop Shadowbase replication and for HPE Shadowbase for Other Servers. The latest GA release for HPE NonStop replication is available now; the GA release for Other Servers is in our internal QA process and will be available later in the Q2 time frame.

The biggest news from a development perspective is that the current HPE NonStop release includes support for the first phase of our synchronous replication and zero data loss software, HPE Shadowbase ZDL. While we are still working with HPE on the product roll-out details, it is available for qualified accounts for testing only in this release (as an HPE Shadowbase “TCD” release). Please contact Shadowbase Support if you are interested in testing synchronous replication.

Other highlights for HPE Nonstop Shadowbase replication include:

• The number of TMF audit trails that Shadowbase can process were increased from 16 to 64, to keep pace with the latest HPE TMF changes.
• The queue manager (AUDQMGR) now supports the ALTER command, allowing the queue manager’s configuration to be changed without stopping and restarting replication.
• Version 6.230 of the DOC Writer introduces a new method of writing and reading the DOC files that eliminates the need for one of the tracking files, the TRANSDOC file. This method significantly reduces the DOC writing/reading overhead, particularly for BEGIN and COMMIT events. It also introduces a new, more effective method of blocking events within the DOC. Combining the two enhancements improves the DOC writing performance 5 to 10 times when compared to the previous algorithm and improves the overall Shadowbase SQL/MX performance in the OSS environment.
• The SQL/MX configuration macros SBUNDROS and SBBIDROS directly support the new DOC writing and reading enhancements.
• The SQL/MX collector, SBCOLL, supports collecting Enscribe and SQL/MP events as well. SBCOLL is our “go-forward” collector and will receive the majority of future enhancements as we work to retire AUDCOLL (ADCOLLN) in a future release. If you are still using AUDCOLL in your configuration, please consider changing to use SBCOLL going forward.
• The SQL/MX collector, SBCOLL, and the queue manager, AUDQMGR, have a variety of MEASURE counters for enhanced performance monitoring.

The next GA release for Shadowbase for Other Servers is currently in our QA process now and will release in May. This release includes:

• Support for IBM Db2^® as a source database: source collection for Db2 requires IBM MQ and IBM Db2 Data Event Publishing for collection. Contact Shadowbase Support for more information.
• HPE Shadowbase Log Source for Oracle supports Oracle 12c container databases: Oracle 12c container databases allow multiple user database instances to be administered in a single Oracle instance.
• HPE Shadowbase Log Source for Oracle supports collecting from multiplexed log files in all collection modes.
• The performance enhancements for DOC reading and writing initially implemented for OSS are available for all platforms.

These are just some of the highlights for the latest releases. There are many more enhancements and bug fixes. Please see the release SOFTDOCS for more information.

For our customers who purchased Shadowbase software through HPE, all of the GA releases are available through HPE NonStop Scout. All other customers can receive the releases directly from Gravic; contact Shadowbase Support for instructions on downloading the release. There are three tables at the end of this column to assist with determining the components and their latest versions, organized by HPE Product ID/SKU. The first table lists the components and versions for the HPE Shadowbase products for NonStop servers; the second lists the components and versions for the HPE Other Server Shadowbase products currently available; and the third lists the components and versions for the next HPE Other Server Shadowbase releases, coming in May.

Coming Soon

Looking forward, we continue to improve the HPE Shadowbase product suite with HPE Shadowbase ZDL. Synchronous replication is an ongoing development focus with several releases planned in the coming years, starting with supporting bi-directional replication in a synchronous configuration.

While we work on enhancing synchronous replication, we are not ignoring our core asynchronous replication products. Other planned enhancements include:

• Enhanced support for sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) configurations to prevent erroneous updates (e.g., due to misconfiguration) to the backup database from replicating back to the primary system.
• Better parallelism for heavily updated tables by further partitioning replication of a single table or partition down multiple threads.
• Enhancements to Shadowbase Compare, to support better parallelization of compare sessions and correction for mismatched data.
• DOC encryption and decryption for data at rest protection.

Table 1 – HPE NonStop Replication Component Versions

Table 2 – HPE Other Servers Replication Component Versions

Table 3 – HPE Other Servers Replication Component Versions (Releases May 2017)

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.