Overview

The user visible changes implemented through these patches (along with critical bug fixes) are covered in this document (relative to the original B.08.00 release).

This document extends on the Eloquence B.08.00 release notes and reflects the changes in the Eloquence patch bundle PE80-B100211.

Contents

• Database Server
• Database Utilities
• Eloquence Language

Database server

• During an automatic forward-log file switch it could happen in rare cases that transactions were not written to the forward-log.
• Renaming a database could cause the database server process to abort.
• Internal memory leaks were fixed.
• The database server could hang due to an internal deadlock.
• The database server could fail to start with an inconsistent generation count error message.
• In rare cases the buffer cache could fail to write a page modification to disk, resulting in an incorrect free-list page link/pointer.
• The database server could abort after an overflow of an internal counter variable.
• Searching an index could cause the database server to abort.

• The dbctl forwardlog status command no longer requires dba privileges.

• The dbctl list command was enhanced. A filter expression may be specified and the /count option may be used to only obtain the number of matching entries.

  For example:

  $ dbctl list session "pname=*query3k*"
  $ dbctl list lock /count "status=blocked"

  Please refer to the dbctl documentation for details:
  http://eloquence.marxmeier.com/support/B0800/doc/dbctl/index.html#list

• The database server enables dbutil to change item order.

• When a dbutil ADD ITEM data set clause is used to add an item of type P (packed) to a data set, the subsequent restructuring process now initializes this new P item to unsigned zero. Previously, a new P item was initialized to binary zero.

• Improved database compatibility checks on DBOPEN have been implemented to prevent opening incompatible databases from newer Eloquence versions.

Database Utilities

dbfsck

• The dbfsck memory consumption has been significantly reduced. This causes a noticable improvement of the pass 1 runtime and allows to use dbfsck on large database environments.

• Progress information has been added which is output when the -v command line option is specified. If enabled, progress info is output every minute to stdout.

  The command line example below redirects dbfsck messages to a log file while progress info is output to the terminal:

  $ dbfsck -v 2>dbfsck.log

  Example progress message output:

  Processed 222437 of 556094 pages (40%)

  Progress information output is suppressed if pass 1 is skipped.

• A 64 bit dbfsck build is now available for the HP-UX (PA-RISC 2.0 and Itanium) and Windows platforms.

  Large database environment sizes (approximately above 400 GB) may require the 64 bit dbfsck version to overcome a 32 bit address space limitation. If the 32 bit dbfsck issues a memory allocation failure, the 64 bit dbfsck should be used.

  On Linux, the x86_64 and ia64 builds provide a 64 bit dbfsck, while the i686 build provides a 32 bit dbfsck.

• dbutil was enhanced to support changing item order.

  The ORDER ITEMS BY NAME statement may be used to order the items by name.

  ORDER ITEMS BY NAME;

  The CHANGE ITEM syntax was enhanced to support changing the item order. The ORDER BEFORE|AFTER clause may be used to specify the new item position, relative to another item.

  CHANGE ITEM NAME2 ORDER AFTER NAME1;
  CHANGE ITEM CUSTNO ORDER BEFORE NAME1;

  The CREATE ITEM syntax was enhanced to support specifying the item order. The BEFORE|AFTER clause may be used to specify the new item position, relative to another item. If not specified, items are added at the end.

  CREATE ITEM NAME2,X30 AFTER NAME1;

• The dbrepl utility now issues an additional exit code 3 in case a connection problem is detected, for example if the replication slave server is temporarily unavailable.

  The exit codes issued by dbrepl are:

    0 - successful execution, graceful exit
  
        (will only be issued if the -S or -G command line option is
        used and dbrepl executed normally until the existing log or
        the current generation has been processed) 
  
    1 - failure, typically requires manual intervention
  
        (for example, a configuration problem on the replication
        master or slave servers)
  
    2 - invalid or -help command line option
  
        (the command line usage was output)
  
    3 - connection problem
  
        (could not connect or lost the connection to the replication
        slave server)

  Exit code 3 may be used in a script to retry the dbrepl invocation. Preferably, repeated invocations should be appropriately delayed, for example by sleeping 60 seconds between two invocations.

• When processing an audit file, any comment records are now output to stderr.

  Audit comment records are used to record any problems that may have occurred while the original forward-log was processed. When an archived audit file is later used with fwaudit, these comment record messages are now output to stderr. Previously they were output to stdout along with the clear-text report.

  In addition, the warning messages written to comment records have been revised so that they now clearly indicate that they were created while the original forward-log was processed.

• The QUERY3K utility was changed to ignore a FF character (formfeed, 0x0c) if it is the first character in an input line. This allows to use QUERY3K output files with XEQ. Previous versions of QUERY3K failed with a syntax error.

  The QUERY3K REPORT command uses a FF character to indicate a new page in its output. This makes it difficult to use a QUERY3K report subsequently in an XEQ statement without disabling the paging (option NOPAGE or SET LINES=0). However, this was possible on MPE.

Eloquence Language

• Valid PRINTER numbers were extended from -2:99 to -2:999.

• Added the POPUPBOX option to the config file to allow enabling function keys to interrupt a POPUP BOX statement.

  When enabled, a defined FUNCTION KEY or HALT interrupts a POPUP BOX statement and returns -1 as the selected choice.

  This function is enabled in the configuration file by specifying the option POPUPBOX and the asssociated config value. For example:

  option popupbox 7

  The option value is bit encoded:

    1 = sfk
    2 = halt
    4 = ESC

  Please note that this functionality is not available when using the DLG driver.