Shadowbase Development News

John R. Hoffman
Sr. Manager of
Shadowbase
Development

Since the signing of the contract with HP to resell the Shadowbase product suite, the Shadowbase Development and Delivery Departments have been dedicated to integrating our suite of products into the HP NonStop product family. This work has impacted virtually every area of Shadowbase, including:

•  Nomenclature: All products resold by HP will have HP or HP NonStop preceding the name.
• Versioning: We released new versions of all of our software and have elected to give the coordinated release the same version number across all of our platforms: Version 6.100. Our software banners and VPROCs were updated to reflect both the new version and the newly assigned HP component identification numbers (T-Numbers).
• Documentation: All of the Shadowbase manuals were made current for the latest release of Shadowbase (Version 6.100) and are available publicly in the NonStop Technical Library on HP’s website.
• Training: The training materials were significantly revised and updated to reflect the latest release of Shadowbase.
• Software: As mentioned above, we released new versions of all of our software. While primarily focused on changes required by HP, we are also pleased to announce some significant new functionality. The sections below highlight these changes, and more detailed information is available in the Shadowbase Softdocs.
• Licensing: Our licensing model for NonStop systems changed from licensing based upon the node name to one based upon system number. Licensing for Shadowbase for Other Servers now checks additional features such as operating system and database.

Please Note: Due to the changes in licensing, existing customers will require a new license file when upgrading to Version 6.100 or beyond from a prior version. If you are a current customer, please contact Shadowbase Support prior to upgrading to ensure that you have a valid license file.

In addition to the changes to versioning and licensing mentioned above, some highlights of the new Shadowbase for Other Servers (SBOS) Release 6.100 include:

• Batching Transactions: We added the capability of batching (or grouping) multiple transactions from the source together into a single transaction for replay on the target. This capability can provide a significant performance improvement by reducing the number of transactions on the target, and, in particular, by reducing the number of commit operations. For small, OLTP transactions, the commit operation is 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 is reduced and the overall replication throughput is significantly increased. Transaction batching is enabled by default in the new release and should provide a significant performance boost to most if not all customers.
• Oracle Log Source Replication: We added 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 log source replication solution (decoupled access to the replicated events). The log source option decouples the replication engine from the application database interaction, and, in typical situations, allows much higher throughput for the capture of the change data.

Shadowbase NonStop Release 6.100 includes a number of bug fixes as well as several enhancements in addition:

• The EMS Subsystem Id (SSID) was changed to reflect the new version; it is now GRAVIC.100.H61.
• DDL processing was enhanced to better prevent ping-ponging in active/active configurations.

Some highlights of the Shadowbase Enterprise Manager (SEM) Release 6.100 include:

• The SEM menus and dialogs were enhanced to more closely model the Windows 7 look and feel.
• Support for the NonStop QMGR, SOLVMGR, and the OPCOL for Oracle Log Source was added.
• A new HTML-based help subsystem compatible with Windows 7 was added.
• A number of usability and reliability enhancements were included; the Softdocs provide further details.

Shadowbase SQL Compare and Shadowbase Audit Reader, Version 6.100, were enhanced to support the new licensing and version information.

Beta testing of our first synchronous replication product, Shadowbase ZDL, for HP NonStop environments continued through the summer, primarily focused on performance. 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 subsequently providing collision avoidance in active/active architectures via the follow-on Shadowbase ZDL Plus SR product.  Please note that Shadowbase’s synchronous transaction support is currently in beta and not available FCS at this time.  We are actively seeking additional beta sites, and would like to speak with those customers willing to beta Shadowbase ZDL.  Contact Shadowbase Product Management at [email protected] for more information.

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.

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