Every year the Emeapug challenge is held for everyone who uses Progress products to develop or run business systems. Since we at TVH are using Progress for our internal software, 4 of my colleagues and myself got the chance to attend the event in Dublin. It was being held in the Croke Park Stadium was of course an extra plus, too bad we didn't get to see a game of Hurling or Football.

The 3-day conference encourages everybody to become a speaker and share interesting ideas, tools and insights. This gives us the chance to choose from a large variety of talks and workshops: interesting for all database administrator and developer profiles, from junior to senior-level.

Starting off with a workshop kickstarting Docker with OpenEdge. The Progress-side of TVH is not yet working with Docker, so it made sense to take a look at how other companies were using this together with OpenEdge. A lot was covered in this workshop, from setting up your system and running your first "Hello world"-container, to spinning up a small Kubernetes cluster and showing off how easy it could (and should) be to deploy changes to your application. Developers should be able to create a dockerfile and then submit it to a platform which takes care of all the load balancing, logging ... This session was great for both people new to Docker as well as experienced Docker users.

The second day was filled with performance tweaks, quality metrics, transaction scoping and index usages given by database experts. Many developers, even though working with Progress for several years, can still learn a lot about these topics.

Progress being very forgiving for developers can cause them to make small errors that have a huge impact on for example the database by not handling transaction scoping correctly. At TVH we are already closely monitoring a lot of these metrics, but being able to explain why something is potentially dangerous to a developer is of course equally important.

Of course a lot of the attendees were looking forward to the changes the new OpenEdge release will bring next year.
OpenEdge 12.0 is meant to introduce some huge improvements on both performance and continuous availability, which should allow clients to hit 99,999% uptime, but also security and scalability. Things such as online DB maintenance (online index rebuilds) and online schema changes are something every Database Administrator can’t wait to try out. The multi-threaded DB processing is promising up to 3x performance improvements, which, according to them, is still a conservative estimate. Long-awaited updates to the developer studio to make the life of a developer easier and additions to quality and best practices checks were also a welcoming change.
A lot of promises were made during this (sales)-pitch, we can only hope for all of them to be true and can’t wait for the release mid 2019.

By Thomas Snoeck, Senior Software engineer