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Growth: It's a Good Problem To Have!But what are you going to do about it?

Abstract: Many partners start out with a great idea, create a fantastic product, have success in their market and then their customers start getting really successful and grow a lot too. Suddenly you have a tiger by the tail!

Come to this session to learn about some surprisingly simple steps that you can take to be in the drivers seat when things start going really, really well!

Growth: It's a Good Problem To Have!

But what are you going to do about it?

Tom Bascom, White Star Softwaretom@wss.com

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A Few Words about the Speaker

• Tom Bascom; Progress user & roaming DBA since 1987

• VP, White Star Software, LLC– Expert consulting services related to all aspects of Progress and

OpenEdge.– tom@wss.com

• President, DBAppraise, LLC– Remote database management service for OpenEdge.– Simplifying the job of managing and monitoring the world’s

best business applications.– tom@dbappraise.com

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A bit more about me…

• I was once an application partner…• We started small…• We had a lot of success…• And learned a few lessons along the way.

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Audience Survey

• Application Partners?• Service Partners?• How long have you been working with

Progress?• Are you: Business? Technical? Jack of all

trades?• Number of Customers?• Annual Sales Volume?

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Success!

• You start out with a business idea and turn that into software…

• … it’s a good idea and good software. • Customers like it and it enables them to be

successful!• Sales take off!

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Success!

• You start out with a business idea and turn that into software…

• … it’s a good idea and good software. • Customers like it and it enables them to be

successful!• Sales take off!• Some of those customers become very

successful – or you attract attention from some who are very large.

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A Tiger by The Tail…

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Too Much of Good Thing

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Headaches

• Keeping up with implementation demand.• Dealing with Big Company expectations.• Finding technical resources to build out new

features, enhancements and customizations.• Deploying scalable systems.

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Implementation Demand

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Implementation Demand

• SaaS• Multi-Tenant Database• The Progress Services Partner ecosystem– All of the good ones can be found in the Expo

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Implementation Demand

• SaaS• Multi-Tenant Database• The Progress Services Partner ecosystem– All of the good ones can be found in the Expo

• Customization Management Strategy• Utilization of a Rules Engine

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Customizations

• Be data driven – not code driven.– Data pushes the management of customizations

out to the client.– Code requires much more complex management

and deployment strategies and is much more brittle over time.

• But do not build a database inside a database!– Generic key/value pair records are tempting but

ripe for abuse.

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Rules Engine

• I cannot say enough good things… but I’ll try!• Helps to clearly separate logic from UI and

data access.– Greatly improves testability!

• “No coder” customization.• Rapid turn-around of customizations.• Moves logic customizations to the customer’s

business people.

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Progress Corticon

• Declarative• Spreadsheet-like UI• Design-time conflict & coverage analysis• Automatic rule consolidation and optimization• Linear scalability• .NET or Java (Windows or UNIX)• Clusterable

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Big Companies

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Big Companies

• Robust Failover and Recovery• Security• Sensitive Information• Audit• Source Code• IT Empires and counter-productive “Corporate

Policy”

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Help is Available

• In the Expo

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Dealing with Snobs

• Some people look down their noses at any technology that does not conform to their prejudices.

• To help bigots understand the OpenEdge Database: “Pretend that it is Oracle”

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Technical Resources

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Technical Resources (part 1)

• Congratulations! You are already at PUG Challenge

• Progress Exchange• Local PUG Meetings• Online Forums:– PEG– ProgressTalk– LinkedIn– Progress Communities

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Technical Resources (part 2)

• OpenEdge is a small niche with high demand.• When people say that they “cannot” find

Progress resources they often really mean that they cannot find them as cheaply as they want them.

• Be wary of cheap resources!• If you find resources available for a low price

there just might be a very good reason why the price is low.

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Supply & Demand

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Technical Resources (part 3)

• OpenEdge is very teachable.• One good way to obtain technical resources is

to train staff looking to transition from other technologies.

• The main thing is aptitude plus attitude…

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Scalability

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Scalable Systems (part 1)

• Use Type 2 Storage Areas!– Configure “technical” NOT “functional”– Minimum: Data, Index and LOB type 2 areas– Default: 128 rows per block, 64 blocks per cluster

• Plan to be upgradeable!• Do NOT tie your database to Windows servers.

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Scalable Systems (part 2)

• Transaction Scope– Abuse of DB Transactions to Implement Business

Rules• Control Tables• Query Efficiency• Single Threaded Operations and Queues• Do NOT tie your app-servers and batch

processes to Windows (prowin32)

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Bigger is NOT always better

• NUMA Servers, SANs, -L, -B, -spin, RAID5, RAID6, big disks

• Sharing is not caring– SANs, Thin Provisioning of all sorts, Virtualization

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Partner Worst Practices

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Partner Worst Practices

• One Size Fits All• Customers must use Progress version X.Y SP Z

– (Even when there are well-known corruption issues with that release.)

• “We won’t support customers if…”– You modify the storage areas.– You upgrade Progress.– You change any startup parameters.– You use any OS other than Windows X.Y SP Z– You talk to anyone outside the partner organization.

• Failure to implement after-imaging.

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Questions?

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Thank You!

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