OpenEdge Replication Is Full of Transitions in Our Latest Release

Learn what’s new in Progress OpenEdge Replication, and how it can help decrease your risk of single points of failure. With the heightened demand for availability, businesses can't afford downtime. Here’s a recap from the engineering team of the new enhancements that will help keep you up and running.

For OpenEdge Replication, version 11.7 brings quite a few changes—but all these changes mean greater peace of mind for you and your business.   

First of all, OpenEdge Replication has transitioned into a much more reliable product. As with every component of OpenEdge, we are constantly striving for improvement. Long hidden bugs have been found and fixed; corner cases have been examined and tested; and sanity checks and early error preventions have been installed.

The second transition happens in transition, and that’s no typo!

In OpenEdge Replication, transition simply means database role changes. For example, a source database becomes a target, and vice versa. There are two kinds of transitions: the failover transition, basically a role reversal, can be used for planned maintenance; and the recovery transition, which can be used either manually or automatically, handles unexpected events such as a complete loss of the source.

OpenEdge Replication supports one or two targets. The biggest change in 11.7 happens to the two-target configuration. To distinguish from previous behaviors, a new concept, “Replication Set,” has been introduced. When a Replication Set transitions, all the databases in the set, if available at the time, will transition together and synchronize with each other afterwards.

What does this mean for you? With Replication Set enabled, you can get more protection from single points of failure, which in turn, provides higher availability of the data. The ability to reduce downtime  is fundamentally important in a cloud-driven and digital-centric world. Everyone tries to live in the cloud and the last thing you want is to fall from the sky! With OpenEdge, if a source database is lost, there will still be two databases running and replication will continue without a rebase. We bet everyone knows how painful a rebase can be, but that’s a separate topic.

What else? With many enhancements in VSTs, replication monitor and utility, OpenEdge Replication now provides a more user friendly environment. And we almost forgot, even the transition process runs faster!

That’s a quick overview of the enhancements you’ll find in OpenEdge Replication with our latest release, OpenEdge 11.7. If you are already an OpenEdge Replication user and have a current maintenance agreement, you will receive these enhancements for free by upgrading to OpenEdge 11.7. We suggest you give it a try with our 60-day eval.  

Our transition efforts continue…. see you next time with OpenEdge 12!

Update: Want to dive deeper? You can learn more about replication sets in our getting started post here.

This post was written by Dapeng Wu, Software Architect, as well as Jeff Owen, Principal Software Engineer.