However, a little more surprising was what got those customers who had an early preview really excited. In response to a customer request, one of our developers added a small switch to our OpenEdge server-side logic that exposed the ABL hidden tables to DataPA OpenAnalytics. It was a simple change, taking no more than a few minutes, but what we’d exposed was access to the OpenEdge VST’s (Virtual System Tables).
Now any of our customers that connect DataPA OpenAnalytics to an OpenEdge database (which accounts for the vast majority of our customers), can create, share and collaborate with live database monitoring dashboards on the web and mobile devices. Imagine your DBA, sat outside eating lunch, being able to check which user is locking a particular table with a few clicks on their mobile. Maybe not such a great prospect for the long suffering DBA, but great news for the rest of us!
The VST’s offer some fantastic insights into the physical storage, performance, memory usage and user activity of the database. With this in mind, we asked our developers to come up with the “ultimate dba dashboard for OpenEdge”. Unfortunately none of them are proficient DBA’s, and it didn’t take long before they got bored and wandered off to play with JavaScript, the Android SDK, the iOS SDK and other such toys they’re more familiar with.
What we have is a good start (take a look), but far from comprehensive. If anyone in the OpenEdge community has any advice for our errant developers on what would be useful to add, we’d be most grateful. We’re also more than willing to offer an extended evaluation license and support to anyone who wants to try it out, and give us some feedback on how to improve it. Please just get in touch.
