#System Administration

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

Hello!

I am trying to install Caché 2016 on a Debian Jessie machine; so I downloaded the latest release from WRC, OS RHEL x86_64, in tarball format.

I untarred it, then launched cinstall; unfortunately a library was missing. I then elected to kill all the processes (which wasn't easy), remove the two users created, and start again.

Introduction

The following situation always catches out new Ensemble users, and is likely to continue doing this until it is addressed..

A business operation, service or other host that is configured with a dedicated # of actors, (ie, not using the actor pool) runs with the version of compiled code that existed when the host was started. This code is loaded in memory.

Does anyone know any sites who configure an async reporting member to connect to two different failover mirroring sets ?

I know this is supported, but I would like to know how it is working in real world systems.

Any information would be appreciated.

Presenter: Ray Fucillo
Task: Provide high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) in diverse architectures that demand high performance, including replication over long distances
Approach: Give examples of mirror architectures in disparate environments, including geographically separated systems. Discuss performance considerations and advances in InterSystems’ mirroring technology

In this session you will learn about deploying Mirroring to provide HA and DR in diverse architectures that demand high performance and throughput. Challenges and solutions to achieving high throughput will be covered along with mirror architectures that involve long distances and disparate environments.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Murray Oldfield
Task: Avoid bottlenecks caused by scaling up, before they become a problem
Approach: Discuss what operating system and InterSystems metrics you should look at and how to interpret them

Systems behave differently when database activity scales up. In the worst case, bottlenecks appear and users are impacted. This session shows you which operating system and InterSystems metrics you should be looking at and how to interpret them so you can head off bottlenecks before they impact users. This sessions also shows strategies for planning infrastructure taking into consideration InterSystems' data platforms requirements.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Whichever way you want to look at it, their numbers are impressive... growing revenue year-on-year of 69% is amazing... and now they are opening DCs in Canada and India...

http://cloud-computing-today.com/2016/01/29/1074342/

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Do you use any public cloud? Any private one?

Here are a few tips that might be useful to people who are running applications in an environment that's configured to use InterSystems mirroring.

Hi,

Can a Cache Mirror be used in the cloud ? (ie stand up a Primary and Backup member instances in a High Availability Cache Mirroring configuration)

I'm investigating the validity of this configuration, because I was of the understanding that this may not possible due to these cloud servers not (typically) having fixed ip addresses, which interferes with the Virtual IP settings for the mirror set.

Is this correct, and if there are workarounds (like Load Balancing ?) can I have details on how this should be configured ?

I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy. Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured.

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

Some third party backup products may by default restore CACHE.DAT files as UNIX sparse files when there are trailing zeroes in the backup file.

The support for sparse files vary from UNIX distribution and file system types. Sparse files attempt to use file system space more efficiently when blocks allocated to the file are mostly empty similar to thin-provisioned storage. The file system transparently converts metadata representing empty blocks into "real" blocks filled with zero bytes at runtime. The application is suppose to be unaware of this conversion.

In some project, I found the need to use SMIME format https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3851.txt, basically is an standard used to wrap a message together with its signature using a certificate (usually X509). Ensemble don't have a single class to do that but inside the Ensemble installation we have the openssl utility, so in this example I use the "openssl smime" command to sign or verify a message.

The example has two Business Process that able to sign or verify and in order to test I made a simple production.

Hope this helps

The attached zip file contains a bunch of examples of Cache SQL Storage mappings that I have done over the years.

If you have existing globals and want to expose them via Objects or SQL you need to setup Cache SQL Storage mapping. If you do not see an example that helps with your case send me an example and I can help you out.