Optimizing DB Management with OpenEdge Change Data Capture

April 18, 2017 Application Development, OpenEdge

Companies rely on their data for every facet of operations. OpenEdge Change Data Capture (CDC) ensures data accuracy—without taxing performance.

Data has been the great enabler for many businesses, helping them turn figures and facts into actionable insight to deliver more value to customers. However, the rate at which data changes can almost be intimidating at times and there are all sorts of issues surrounding visibility, management and accuracy.

To make things worse, dealing with data is only going to get more difficult moving forward. A recent study conducted by IDC projects the digital universe will expand 44% a year for the next decade, reaching 44 zettabytes by 2020, up from 4.4 zettabytes as of 2013. That’s a lot of data that businesses must keep track of.

Data Accuracy is Key to Uniting Data Sources and Warehouses

If companies want to compete in the modern digital economy, they need to start by taking a long, hard look at how they handle their data. While there are several approaches enterprises can take to improve their overall data management strategies, ensuring data accuracy should be the pivotal first step.

As businesses move to pool data from a growing number of sources, data accuracy has become vital. Companies use this data to analyze their operations and discover ways to capitalize on new opportunities and further grow their operations. However, if data is outdated or inaccurate, it could set off a chain reaction that heavily impacts decision making and operations. At the same time, keeping databases up to date and accurate requires resources, and that impacts database performance.

This is why we’ve seen many businesses turn to techniques like Change Data Capture (CDC) to get the best of both worlds. Instead of looking at the database as a whole, CDC enables businesses to only capture changes made within the OpenEdge database. This enables enterprises to efficiently update all of their data sources without taxing overall performance.

CDC is helping businesses across the world drive the most value from their databases, and that’s why we made CDC a core focus of Progress OpenEdge 11.7. OpenEdge CDC facilitates accurate, efficient synchronization with other data sources and data warehouses without downtime or changing the application. Using OpenEdge CDC, customers can:

  • Identify, track and save changes made within the Progress OpenEdge RDBMS
  • Guarantee accurate tracking of all data changes regardless of where they occur
  • Increase availability of changes, allowing ETL to more efficiently synch identified changes with other data sources
  • Provide a single point of configuration regardless of ABL or SQL

OpenEdge CDC: A Scalable Solution  

The OpenEdge CDC policy designer determines the amount of change data that is gathered, while providing flexibility by using CDC table and field policies. At the lowest level of data capture, the designer can choose to capture only the data operation occurrences, without capturing field values. In addition to capturing data operations, the designer can choose to capture changed data from selected fields or for the entire record.

Make the Most of Your Data with OpenEdge 11.7

CDC is only one major enhancement of the OpenEdge 11.7 release, which also provides high-availability performance and enhanced security capabilities. For a complete overview of the latest release, check out our recent launch webinar.

OpenEdge CDC is an add-on product for the OpenEdge RDBMS, and is available for both Workgroup and Enterprise editions. In fact, if you already own the Advanced Enterprise Edition (AEE) and have an active maintenance contract, you will receive OpenEdge CDC at no additional cost when you upgrade to OpenEdge 11.7. To learn more, contact your account manager or test drive OpenEdge 11.7 today. 

Brian Bowman

Brian Bowman has been working for Progress for over 20 years. He has performed database tuning and disaster planning for all sizes of customers around the world. Brian started in technical support, and has also worked in product development, pre-sales for Direct and Indirect customers and is currently a Senior Principal Product Manager for OpenEdge.

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