In this issue....

11.1.1d is here
isutl: The Next Generation
Harmony Core webinars
Unit Testing in Traditional Synergy
Synergy developer community
Tech Tip
and more

11.1.1d is here

More resilient ISAM files, exciting new developer tools, and much more

A new Synergy/DE release is now available to download for all platforms. All customers are encouraged to update to 11.1.1d for access to new features and quality improvements.

The 11.1.1d release introduces many new features across the product set. These are some of the more significant enhancements:

Global I/O hooks
FULLRESILIENT ISAM files
Support for MySQL 8
Unit testing for traditional Synergy
Traditional Synergy debugger rewritten
And more

See the release notes for a complete list of 11.1.1d changes and the Synergy/DE 11 page for information about the latest Synergy/DE features.

isutl: The Next Generation

By John Brunett, Senior Software Engineer

Over the years, Synergex has provided a few different re-indexing tools for its proprietary ISAM files. Back in the ‘80s when DBL version 4 first came out, before it was called “Synergy,” there was no way to re-index an ISAM file if the index (.ism) was removed or corrupted.

So a few years later, we introduced irebld.dbr. It was just a DBL program that read through the data (.is1) file and then did ISAM STOREs to a new file. Then we introduced the irecovr and ismvfy utilities in Synergy version 5 in the early ‘90s. And then about 20 years ago, we created the Isutl utility, which took advantage of the computer technology of the time, using large 64K-block sequential reads and writes and building the index in a single pass from sorted key files rather than using the per-record STORE logic, which improved performance nearly tenfold.

Now, with the massive leaps in disk size as well as ISAM file size, the isutl utility has undergone a complete redesign of its internal indexing logic, taking advantage of parallel and asynchronous processing using multi-threading and atomic (non-locking) operations. This forward-looking design should ride out the continuing changes in computer technology and provide the best performance possible far into the next decade.

Webinar Series: Building an end-to-end browser-based application with Harmony Core

This four-part webinar series features Synergex software engineer Johnson Luong demoing the “official” Synergex barbeque-organizing app, xfBBQ, which was built through incorporating a Synergy back-end, a React and Redux front-end, and Harmony Core web services.

Join us on these dates:

Part 3: Wednesday, July 1 @ 9 AM PT
Part 4: Wednesday, July 8 @ 9 AM PT

Catch up with Parts 1 and 2, as well as our other Harmony Core-related videos, on our YouTube channel Harmony Core playlist. You can also read more about this project on our blog.

Watch now on YouTube

Unit Testing in Traditional Synergy

By Steve Ives, Product Manager

Unit testing is a method of testing software at a low level, usually at the level of individual subroutines, functions, and methods. Unit tests are frequently written by the same software developers that write the code being tested, and sometimes, in the case of test-driven development, even before the actual code being tested.

To make adding unit tests easy, we have provided a new Visual Studio project template named “Unit Test (Traditional).” It adds a traditional Synergy ELB project to your solution, and that project contains some sample unit test code.

Locating OpenSSL libraries after upgrading to Synergy/DE version 11

After upgrading to version 11, you may get an error that the OpenSSL libraries cannot be found, even though OpenSSL functioned properly in version 10. The problem is likely that the OpenSSL libraries have a dependency on the C++ runtime and the runtime is no longer installed. Do the following:

Run dltest (located in the dbl\bin directory or, if you’re on 11.1.1b or earlier, in the \connect directory; if you didn't install Connectivity Series, just install it temporarily to get this utility). Dltest will likely report that the libraries cannot be found.
Look in the dbl\bin directory to confirm that the files are there.
Download the necessary Visual C++ Redistributable Package to get the runtime. For example, OpenSSL 1.0.2 requires the Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable, available here.
Once the installation is complete, run dltest again. If it can now find the libraries, you have fixed the problem.

This happened because in version 10, SDE installed the C++ runtime that the OpenSSL DLLs depended on. When your system was upgraded to v11, this runtime was no longer needed by Synergy, so it was uninstalled.

Fun Fact

It takes about the same amount of computing to answer one Google search query as all the computing done—in flight and on the ground—for the entire Apollo space program.

Industry News & Articles

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