Pro2 can help your OpenEdge implementation stay highly available by limiting down time during a dump and load procedure.

Pro2 can help your OpenEdge implementation stay highly available by limiting downtime during a dump and load procedure.

Index reorganization is the primary benefit of a dump and load. Index maintenance, using the index rebuild and compact utilities, typically achieves about 80 to 90 percent of the benefits of a dump and load. Yet dumping and loading are still necessary to maintain performance standards. It can also be useful when you need to reorganize your database into different areas or extents due to changes in application requirements.

Pro2 limits the downtime required for dump and load processing to a few hours, regardless of the database size. Note that the speed of the dump and load process is not a concern here, as it is evident that a binary dump and load is much faster than a Pro2 bulk load. However, for example, if it takes 20 hours to perform a dump and load of a 500 GB database using the fastest available method and the business cannot tolerate a 20-hour outage, then you can use Pro2 to replicate to another OpenEdge database. The bulk load may take longer; the downtime will be only a few hours when you are prepared to transition to the newly bulk loaded database. The downtime is the same whether the database size is 10 GB, 100 GB, 1 TB, or 10 TB.

In general, there are two recommended dump and load methods for Pro2:
  • Data Dictionary dump and load tool—For more information, see Dump and load.
  • Bulk load—For larger databases, use the Pro2 bulk load functionality, as it migrates data from one database to another through Pro2 while the database is running. Once you finish loading the bulk loader files sequentially with the indexes turned off, you must rebuild the index. For more information, see Bulk load with Pro2.

For more information about migrating your database with Pro2, see Migrate your OpenEdge database with Pro2.