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Solid software for HP Servers |
Highlights from our recent on-line customer news. The links and full articles are available at www.robelle.com/news |
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What’s Up DOCumentation
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More
news on Carly Fiorina leaving HP at www.internetnews.com,
and forbes
and reuters.
Homesteading, Migration and TipsUK Consultant: HP 3000
and Ecometry Here
is a qualified accountant with 11 years experience of MACS1, MACS2, EuroMACS,
and Ecometry: Colin Daley of LocseL Consultants in Cambridge England. He
supplies services including training, consultancy, financials & VAT,
documentation, support and problem solving, product testing, database extracts
and updates, etc. Both on and off site and via VPN. HP3000 consultant. 15 years
experience, the last 6 yrs in MACS environments, with HP3000/MPE operations,
project planning and management. Experience with third party software products
such as Robelle, Bradmark, Vesoft, OCS/Tidal and Adager. Other areas of
expertise include business contingency planning, credit card authorisation,
print management services. For more details, visit his web site
http://www.locsel.co.uk/ Qedit Tips Specifying a Line
Range, without using Line Numbers One of the little-known
features of Qedit commands is their ability to use strings as a rangelist. Use
them in any command that accepts a rangelist, and then that command will be
applied only to lines containing that string. Strings can be delimited by
quotes, or by any of the following special characters: | ~ _ ! # > & :.
You can further qualify strings if you use window options on the string being
searched. Some examples: Deleting all lines with
the string "superfluous". /delete "superfluous" Deleting all lines
without the string "superfluous". /delete "superfluous" (nomatch) Change "bug"
to "undocumented feature", but only on those lines that have the
string "unexplained". /change "bug"undocumented feature" "unexplained" Delete all blank lines. /delete "~" (pattern) {blank lines}
Find the next occurrence
of the string ".font" that starts in the first column. /find ".font" (1/5) List all occurrences of
"Frank", but not in words such as "Frankenstein". /list "Frank" (smart) {ignores Frankenstein"}
By default, Qedit searches for matches to a string.
Specifying (NOMATCH) reverses this logic. Likewise, string searches can be
restricted to particular columns (10/40), or to a caseless search
(UPSHIFT). If the string represents a
pattern, this should be specified with valid pattern characters:
Suprtool Tips Extracting Pieces
of Binary Dates Neil Armstrong, the
Suprtool Software Architect, writes: We recently received the following inquiry
about extracting out portions of year, month and day, from numeric dates: Hello Support Team, Here is what I need to do, I
have an I2 field with a date stored in YYYYMMDD format and what I need to be
able to do is redefine the field so I can get to each piece. For example: booking-date[1],4 = Century booking-date[5],2 = Month booking-date[7],2 = Day
Our response:
There is a way to isolate year, month and day in one step. It just
involves some simple math in order to do what you want. It is not entirely
obvious how to do this though. Myfile is a file
with a double integer date field called "a" in the format ccyymmdd,
below is a method to extract each portion. >in myfile >def year,1,4,display >def month,1,2,display >def day,1,2,display >ext year=a / 10000 >ext month=(a / 100) mod 100 >ext day=a mod 100 >list >xeq >IN MYFILE.NEIL.GREEN (0) >OUT $NULL (0) YEAR = 2005 MONTH = 2 DAY = 7
You can also use the
$edit function to isolate portions of the date and make the date more readable.
>in myfile >def dispdata,1,10,byte >ext dispdata=$edit(a,"9999 99 99") >list >xeq >IN MYFILE.NEIL.GREEN (0) >OUT $NULL (0) DISPDATA = 2005 02 07
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We
often get asked how to prompt for input from a jobstream. Now our first
suggestion is to see if they have Streamx from Vesoft which is a portion of the
Security/3000 product. If the customer does not have this product, then the
other option is to create a command file that uses MPE commands and I/O
re-direction to make a file that can be streamed. Tip by Neil Armstrong. Performance Experience from a Customer Recently
we received feedback from a customer who had experienced some poor response
times, during peak hours after an upgrade from a 989-650 to an
N4000-400-500(both with 8Gb memory). With an impeding peak resource demand, the
customer was looking to solve the issue with some Suprtool tuning as noted in
our article: http://www.robelle.com/tips/st-performance.html
They
implemented SET MAKEABSENT ON, with some very excellent results, with a
reduction in IO queue waits and higher throughput, however, the real world
impact, was far more important. "We
have an N4000-400-500 with 8 Gb of memory running Ecometry 5.32N on MPE/iX
7.5pp1 using an EMC Symmetrix 8530 over 14 FWD-SCSI channels. "We used a Disk-Tape-Disk migration path for our transition, and considering that we had been on disk for 9 years our databases went from having several sets with >8k extents to newly restored contiguous sets on the new array. "When
we migrated from our 989-650 to this machine in May we experienced some poor
response times at peak hours for our users, generally numbering 400-500
sessions. "After
discussions with both Bill Lancaster at Lund and Sue Horvat at HP suggested
that we put SET MAKEABSENT ON in the SUPRMGR file in July. "Our
response time issue went away with minimal negative impact elsewhere. "Please
note also that our annual Sale began in July and we experienced annual peak in
throughput during that sale. "Note
also that GLANCE generally shows us running 400 to 1200 in Disk I/O/sec range
for most of the day! "We
were VERY pleased with the result going in just before our sale. That made
"the MPE/iX system one of the highlights of a very busy time for us. Tip by Neil Armstrong. Last
month I received a request on how to do something using Suprtool. The issue was
that the customer wanted to do a table lookup and subsequent Update from the
table data, however, the record or table key needed to match on two values, one
that was a double integer and the other was a single integer(well actually a
logical, but the same number of bits). The solution, once you wrap your head
around it, is amazingly simple - click the link above to read the entire story.
Tip by Neil Armstrong. Eloquence
Performance and Suprtool Recently
a customer wrote us about their experience with doing performance tuning on
HP-UX, using Eloquence and Suprtool. Here is a summary of the situation, with
an excellent comparison between Image on MPE and Eloquence on HP-UX. The
customer had a job stream that rebuilds their data warehouse data base nightly,
running on a MPE 959/3. The job contains about 950 lines, and is mostly
Suprtool. It retrieves data from several data bases and puts it in their data
warehouse, then rebuilds the Omnidex indexes. The total number of records were about 4.1 million records spread across about 25 data sets; only 2 datasets exceeded 1,000,000 records. The task took about 3.5 hours wall clock to run on MPE. On
an HP-UX K580 using an Eloquence data base, the first run with the defaults in
the Eloquence config file and the same job ran for 7.5 hours. After
reading the Eloquence website for some suggestions (see http://www.hp-eloquence.com/support/misc/dbtuning.html
the customer decided to change 3 settings within Eloquence:
They
also tuned some Semaphore settings in the HP-UX kernel. After making all these
config changes, the job ran in 2.5 hours. Finally
the customer added Set FastRead On within Suprtool (this option uses a special
mode in Eloquence for faster serial reads) and the job time dropped another 45
minutes, down to an hour and 45 minutes. So
to summarize. At first run (prior to the Eloquence adjustments) the job took
7.5 hours. Adjustments were made to Eloquence settings and the job ran in 2.5
hours. Another 45 minutes of improvement with Fastread, making the total
improvement of 345 minutes, or approximately 4 times less wall time. Tip
by Neil Armstrong. |