OpenEdge 12: Built for Performance

The OpenEdge 12 series boosts performance by 200% compared to older OpenEdge versions.

Let’s be honest, waiting for anything isn’t fun. Even when you’re using the ultimate time-killing distraction—the smartphone—waiting tests the very limits of your patience.

Accessing data can be shockingly similar to waiting in a long line, especially if you’re using a non-threaded database server for your application. As new data requests come in, each server process handles data requests for multiple connections one at a time and therefore slows your performance.

The Importance of Database Processing Speed in the Digital World

Your company’s application infrastructure is crucial to delivering quality application experiences, and at the center of it all lies your database. This is why many of our OpenEdge customers and partners are switching to a multi-threaded model to eliminate the wait.

Recent performance improvements made by the OpenEdge team make this transition possible. Prior to the OpenEdge 12.0 release series, the ABL Database Server was non-threaded, which meant each server process handled data requests for multiple connections one at a time.

With the launch of the OpenEdge 12 series, improved scalability and performance were two of the team’s top priorities. One of the ways we set out to achieve those goals was through the introduction of the new multi-threaded database server (MTDBS) for ABL. The multi-threaded database server improves performance by processing requests in parallel. It also enhances lock wait processing, separates connection processing from OLTP and decreases context switching costs.

Using a multi-threaded database results in greater efficiency and better performance across the board.

Our team recently talked about this in the Progress Talks for OpenEdge 12.1. Richard Banville, Software Fellow remarked on the webcast, “We saw three times the performance improvements over 11.7. Of course, this is for certain queries and your mileage may vary, as always, but we’ve also had reports from customers that are seeing similar things.”

Rich continued, “And what that does is improve the concurrency of requests coming from all these remote clients. More things are being done in parallel on the server side.

“And with that, we’ve got much better use of resources on the server side. There’s a lot less data that’s being sent across the network to the remote client and have additional filtering being done. That doesn’t need to be done with these queries anymore. And really, based on the performance of your network, the reduced data being sent across and the time lag for the network is a tremendous, tremendous improvement.

“And lastly, there was one other thing we did on the database server side, which is we improved some of our latching technology,” Rich added. “With those three things combined, we did tests and built on each one. But with those tests combined we saw three times the performance improvements.”

Of course, there were some other enhancements made in OpenEdge 12.0 and 12.1 that also contributed to the performance enhancements Rich mentions in the Progress Talks.

But Why Is this Important for My Business and/or Application?

Stepping back, you might be asking: what do all of these new features and enhancements mean for my OpenEdge application?

And the answer to that question is dramatically faster performance without the need to change your application code. In fact, in some scenarios, we’ve seen up to 200% improvements in terms of database throughput. Our new whitepaper discusses the methodology behind the tests performed and provides insights into the exact scenarios executed and statistics reported to achieve dramatic performance improvements.

But performance isn’t just one reason to modernize your OpenEdge application. There are a host of other reasons to join the application evolution—a more efficient and agile development process, increased performance, agility, security and scalability and so much more.

But evolving your application doesn't happen all at once. It starts with thinking about where your business is today, and where you want it to be tomorrow. The first step in that journey is migrating to the OpenEdge 12 release series.

Check out our webinars to learn about more upcoming webinars and find replays of previous recordings.