A broker spawns servers, listens for connection requests from remote clients, and assigns remote clients to a server. There are two types of servers, ABL and SQL. ABL servers serve only ABL clients, and SQL servers serve only SQL clients.

In general, a broker can handles communication for both types of servers and clients. As a best practice, if you have multiple types of servers, you should have multiple brokers, each dedicated to one type of server.

There are two types of brokers:

  • Primary broker—Instantiates and manages the shared memory of a database and performs the watchdog function. If you have multiple types of servers, you should direct the primary broker to serve OpenEdge ABL servers.
  • Secondary broker—If you have multiple types of servers, you should direct a secondary broker to serve OpenEdge SQL servers.