Rant about CDC/Pro2

Cringer

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
I need somewhere to rant so please excuse me for a few moments.

OE 11.7.12/13.

Once a month we copy the backup from live to UAT and restore it, and anonymise the data in it for GDPR reasons. This process takes a long time, but it's manageable. This is standard operation. UAT is a different server to Live, naturally.

Recently we implemented Pro2SQL, using CDC policies, in live. Pro2 gives you a single machine license for CDC, so therefore we don't have CDC licenses in UAT. Progress allows you to restore a CDC enabled database with policies on a machine without CDC licenses, but that's just about it. Once it's restored, you can't even disable CDC as you get an error telling you there are policies. You can't connect to the database in single user mode, let alone proserve it. So you can't connect to it and remove the policies.

Even with a CDC license you have to execute code to remove the policies (and if there is any tracking data you have to remove that too).

Progress's official method for doing what we do is to restore the backup onto the Live machine, remove the policy and tracking data, disable CDC and then back that database up again, transfer it to UAT and carry on as before. Our database isn't massive, but at around 300GB that's a lot of extra space, and time, for a process that is already not fast.

Progress have created a utility to do the job without a license, but it's only available in 12.5+. So it's not in any LTS release. And won't be in any LTS release until they release the next one. They view this as new functionality, not a bug fix.

Surely I can't be alone in this? In fact I know I'm not, because the idea for the utility in 12.5 came from the ideas board in the community. This is more than an inconvenience.

Ironically it's not an issue for our development server as this has a development server license where you can evidently serve up a CDC enabled database without issue.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
I think the problems you have described above are symptoms of a larger issue: for the most part, Progress Software doesn't use OpenEdge. So they lack a vital internal feedback loop and the benefits it would bring to feature design and support.

Progress have created a utility to do the job without a license, but it's only available in 12.5+. So it's not in any LTS release. And won't be in any LTS release until they release the next one. They view this as new functionality, not a bug fix.

Unfortunately, this is the result of my point above together with the new OpenEdge Life Cycle policy. The policy doesn't allow any release, LTS or not, to evolve; the feature set is locked in at first shipment. If a feature has a bug and fixing it is a high enough priority, that can be addressed with an update. But if a feature is missing entirely due to a fundamentally incomplete design, it cannot be added until a newer release. For those who choose to use LTS releases only (and there are valid reasons for doing so), this can mean waiting years for the missing functionality to be added.

It currently looks like the next LTS release will be 12.8 in late 2023.

Ironically it's not an issue for our development server as this has a development server license where you can evidently serve up a CDC enabled database without issue.

That is surprising to me, as there is no dev database license per se. What product licenses you do you have installed in dev that are not in prod?
 

Cringer

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
Hmm well... somehow dev works and that's the only difference I can see.
 
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