New OpenEdge version 12.7 available!
In may 2023 Progress released another innovation release of OpenEdge: version 12.7.
Find out what's new in this release and prepare your development team for what will be made available in the upcoming new Long Term Supported version.
In the meantime find out what has been included in the latest 12.2 Service Pack published on the 11th of May 2023 on this web page.
What were the important new features in 12.6?
One of the most important new features is the integration with Kafka. Many modern enterprises, who are looking at distributed streaming platforms for their event-driven ecosystems, have chosen Apache® Kafka® as their preferred technology. After OpenEdge is integrated with Kafka, OpenEdge applications are able to participate in an event-driven architecture based on the Kafka platform to send and receive messages from ABL applications or to be consumed by other Kafka applications.
In the Object Oriented ABL there's a possibility to serialize a SortedSet collection to JSON.
Another important feature is focused on allowing developers to identify memory leaks. This is particularly important when migrating from the classic broker-agent based Application Server to the modern tomcat based multithreaded PASOE.
The database areas that have had enhancements include: PROUTIL IDXCOMPACT cleans up unused index blocks (useful when doing mass delete operations), large file support for all database licenses (no longer only Enterprise license), truncate data storage area online, concurrently runnable diagnostic utilities (with read-only connections), reduction of index fix processing overhead, binary dump with more data and detail about corrupted records anddump and load table data with data admin utilies like DataAdminService class, OpenEdge .DataAdmin and OpenEdge.DataAdmin.Util packages.
Finally OpenEdge 12.6 is now supported on JDK 17.
Pleas note that the 12.6 release is an innovation release and nota long-term-service release. This means that in case of a bug, you must upgrade to the next innovation release as now service packs are released on an innovation release. That's why we suggest to use the 12.6 release in development only and not in production.
For all the details follow this link which leads you directly to the What's New Page on the Progress website:
Whats-New-in-OpenEdge-12.6.html
Remember what features we got in 12.5?
A very important new feature in OpenEdge 12.5 is the Data Integration with Kafka! It allows to both consume as well as to produce messages to Kafka Clusters.
For the developers there are some nice additions to the ABL in particular: List Collections, Class Property Override, ABL Safe Navigation Operator (AKA the "Elvis" operator ?:) and faster, server side AGGREGATE statements.
The Database has been enhanced with BI truncation on Replication target databases, improved compression for database backups, faster IDXFIX utility and easily move and trancate Large Objects (LOB).
New encryptions methods (AES-GCM) have been added to increase the security and the integration with OAuth2 and SAML has been improved.
There's a new realease of the OpenEdge Command Center (1.1) to manage all PAS OE instances and to easily view, deploy and undeploy ABL Applications and ABL REST Services.
In the OpenEdge Developer Studio a new features has been made available: Intelligent Compilation. It will compile all related source files when an include fill or class has been changed. It relies on the XREF compilation data and "knows" the relationship between a source file and all it's related (and nested) include files and classes.
Furthermore the management of the PASOE Agents has been simplified by the introduction of the session identifier in the database client connection. This offers the possibility to safely terminate unresponsive sessions without terminating other running sessinos.
Need more information? Just ask us by filling out the Contact form on the bottom of this article. Remember, you can receive a free hour of consultancy!
And don't forget the new features in 12.4
A whole new database reorganize utility to takes away the need to do Dump&Loads offline!
A new DevOps framework based on Gradle.
Database enhancements like Auto-reconnect and BIM (a BI management helper process).
There's also a new Command Center to control your Progress Application Servers in the Cloud
Check out the details on Progress' "What's New in OpenEdge 12" page.
What we already got in OpenEdge 12.3
And remember what we already received in Progress OpenEdge 12.3
Buffer Hash Tables
Query server side joins.
And probably the most important feature in the 12.3 release can be summarized like this: NO MORE DUMPS & LOADS!!
Thanks to a new option on the proutil command TABLEREORG a D&L can be performed without stopping the database...
Reorganize fragmented record data
The new PROUTIL TABLEREORG qualifier lets you reorganize fragmented record data while the associated table remains accessible to OLTP operations. The new process replaces lengthy dump and load operations, index rebuilds of associated indexes, and replication target rebase. Eligible record data must all be located within the same Type II storage area. Partitioned and multi-tenant tables are supported.
For details, see PROUTIL TABLEREORG qualifier.
And these are only a few of the exiting features available.
Need help?
As always, WITS can help you in plan and execute the migration.
Progress Survey
You can let Progress know when you're planning to migrate to version 12 by taking this Survey
There's also the annual Product OpenEdge Survey that allows you to give your opinion on what features you would like to see in upcoming releases.
Hurry up because the survey will close this week! (the 5th of November 2021)
Differences between 12.2 and 12.5
Customer and partners have asked what are the differences between the current Long Term Supported (LTS) release of OpenEdge (12.2) and the now available Non-Long Term Support release (12.5). Here are the details as described on n Progress' "What's New in OpenEdge 12" page.
- OpenEdge 12.2 is a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. This enables customers to realize the benefits of OpenEdge while continuing to receive technical support for several years. This gives greater operational stability and longevity on a release while allowing informed, confident decisions.
- OpenEdge 12.5 is a Non-Long Term Supported release. This release supports continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to those who benefit from a faster release cadence. A Non-LTS also provides customers an opportunity to use and test features that will appear in upcoming Long-Term Supported (LTS) releases.
So basically we at WITS suggest to use the 12.2 release in a production environment and the 12.5 in development.
For more questions, just ask us by filling out the Contact form on the bottom of this article. Remember, you can receive a free hour of consultancy!
