HP-UX/Eloquence Performance and Suprtool
Neil Armstrong, Robelle, Jan 2005Recently 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://eloquence.marxmeier.com/support/misc/dbtuning.html the customer decided to change 3 settings within Eloquence:
| Old | New | |
| BufferCache | 5 | 128 |
| EnableIPC | 0 | 2 |
| Syncmode | 1 | 0 |
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.
Eloquence for Suprtool on HP-UX
| Suprtool/UX version 4.7.11 supports the Dbedit module on Eloquence- quick retrieval and correction of data entries. |
The Eloquence database is very much like the TurboIMAGE database. Although it does not run on the HP 3000 (MPE), it does run on the HP 9000 (HP-UX). Many sites are happy with their existing HP 3000 applications and would like to replicate them on a platform with a longer future. For them Eloquence can be part of the solution.
If this sounds interesting, read our non-technical introduction to Eloquence which should answer many of your questions.
Try Suprtool with Eloquence Today!
| August 2002: For information on exporting from TurboIMAGE to Eloquence, read Bob Green's HPWorld 2002 paper on "Transforming TurboIMAGE Data. |
We have the same Suprtool commands that you are familiar with on MPE now working on HP-UX, and at the April 2002 Solutions Symposium, Dave Wilde (CSY R&D manager at HP) endorsed using Eloquence to migrate applications from MPE to HP-UX.
As far as IMAGE/SQL alternatives go for customers who would benefit from keeping their “Image-calls” and do a “one-step at-a-time” approach, he said that he is committed to promoting Eloquence to fill that need. He said that it’s “likely the best approach,” and that “the product is very solid and very strong …”
Enhancements for Eloquence 7
Eloquence version B.07.00 has been released. This version has the TurboIMAGE compatibility improvements and many other enhancements.
Suprtool 4.6.02, pre-release, was the first 3000-derived software tool to support the new Eloquence 7. Now Suprtool 4.7, production release, is the choice for those customers migrating to Eloquence 7. This means that the Get, Update, Form and Chain commands support all major functionality of Eloquence. But in addition, the Base and Put commands were enhanced with new syntax to support the flexible ways in which Eloquence can specify the database to be opened:
Base Command
Suprtool's Base command has been enhanced to allow the new syntax supported in HP Eloquence 7. HP Eloquence now allows the servername and service to be specified in dbopen. To support this new syntax Suprtool's Base command has been changed to allow the servername, service and database name be specified. Suprtool uses the same syntax as Eloquence whereby the database name consists of the following elements:
[[host][:service]/]databaseExamples of using this syntax within Suprtool using the sample database that Eloquence provides.:
base sample,5
base :eloqdb/sample,5
base hostname.robelle.com:eloqdb/sample,5
Put Command
The Put command has always supported for a database name to be specified. Since the Base command allows the new syntax for HP Eloquence version 7 support, the Put command also allows this new syntax.
put dataset,sample
put dataset,:eloqdb/sample
put dataset,hostname.robelle.com:eloqdb/sample
July 2002 Press Release
Robelle Leads in Migration SolutionsFirst 3000 Vendor to Support Eloquence,
Eloquence Technical Data
What Is Eloquence?Eloquence is an IMAGE-like database that runs on HP-UX, LINUX and Windows. It is developed by Marxmeier Software.
Attributes of the Eloquence:
Fully integrated indexing capabilities. Eloquence uses indexed sequential instead of hashing, so there are no "migrating secondaries" and set locking is not required in order to add or delete an entry from a master set.
Capacity is no longer relevant, since the database grows dynamically when required (including master data sets).
Version A.06 added new locking capabilities, new database utilities, and multiplatform support (HP-UX, Windows NT/2000, Linux).
Eloquence supports dynamic, nested transactions, transaction isolation (uncommitted changes are not visible to other processes), deadlock detection and recovery, on-line backup, and a new, more flexible security subsystem.
Limitations in Version A.06:
Eloquence A.06 has similar limits to pre C.09 versions of TurboIMAGE. The maximum number of sets is 199 and the maximum number of items is 1024. The string length must be even and cannot exceed 4096 characters. There is no support for packed decimal data types, or Numeric Display ASCII.
Search items are limited in size to 120 bytes. There may be up to 16 paths for a dataset. Maximum dataset capacity is limited only by system disk space. However, maximum number of records may be about 2,000,000,000, since there are still 32-bit pointers to records. The Field List parameter only supports the full-list ("@") option, not a list of item names or numbers. Third-party Indexing is not supported, but indexed sequential is built into Eloquence through native access.
Version A.07:
Marxmeier finished version A.07 in November 2002 (and Suprtool/UX version 4.6.02 supported it on the first day it was available). This is a major upgrade to Eloquence, which lifts most of the restrictions of Eloquence vis-ŕ-vis TurboIMAGE. With this new version, migration of applications will be even easier.
Version B.07:
Marxmeier finished version B.07 in early 2003 (and Suprtool/UX version 4.6.04 supported it early on in the release cycle). Now Suprtool 4.7, supports Eloquence B.07 and is available for a trial.
This is a major upgrade to Eloquence, which lifts most of the restrictions of Eloquence vis-ŕ-vis TurboIMAGE. With this new version, migration of applications will be even easier.
