FS Compare and Repair Features New DR Partition and Index Loading Capabilities

For database administrators (DBAs) in HPE NonStop shops, the work is never done. DBAs must work constantly to ensure adequate space and preserve availability and integrity, while maximizing resource efficiency and utilization.

To balance these considerations, they need to put a lot of effort into reorganizing tables, including managing partitions, indexes, and index partitions. For example, they must determine when a new partition needs to be added to accommodate growing data volumes, where and how to add it, and so on. All this effort and complexity is compounded by the fact that DBAs must keep both production databases and backup/disaster recovery instances in synch at all times.

Relying on existing NonStop utilities, this effort of comparing and repairing large files can be  slow, laborious, and resource intensive.

Introducing FS Compare and Repair

FS Compare and Repair offers DBAs fast, advanced capabilities for keeping nodes in synch at all times. The solution uses an innovative, block-level approach that offers breakthrough speed. This means it can more quickly make comparisons, determine which blocks aren’t correct, and if needed, enable the repair of the target block.

With the solution, teams can do comparisons, repairs, and loads, both of entire files and of individual partitions and indexes. These capabilities represent an important addition to the utilities available to NonStop DBAs, and are not available in any competitive solutions.

How it Works and How it Augments Existing Utilities

In parallel, FS Compare and Repair calculates each source and target file partition’s hash signature, operating across multiple CPUs for maximum efficiency. The solution quickly identifies differences so they can be logged and repaired.

Figure 1: FS Compare and Repair – parallel partition hashing on source and target systems.

With FS Compare and Repair, teams can do granular comparisons and repairs of partitions.

Using existing utilities or competitive solutions, teams can’t do these granular comparisons; they have to look at the whole file. These alternatives use record or block compression, and compare records in a sequential order, going one at a time. This consumes high volumes of system and network resources, and results in lengthy comparison times.

With its block-level approach, FS Compare and Repair delivers huge advantages in efficiency and speed. For example, if you have a file with 20 partitions, alternatives would look at the entirety of the file, and compare partitions sequentially.

FS Compare and Repair can do very fast, block-level comparisons of those 20 partitions in parallel. The solution has compared 10 million records in 13 seconds and a 1 TB multi-partitioned file in 10 minutes. With alternative tools, it could take hours and sometimes even weeks to do these same comparisons.

Fast, Granular Repair

Now, FS Compare and Repair offers a new capability that streamlines repairs after discrepancies have been discovered. For DBAs, what is perhaps most beneficial is that the target partition and index loading can also happen at a granular level. With this solution, only the specific blocks in the target file that have discrepancies are updated. On the other hand, in doing repairs, alternative HPE utilities need to load the entire partition or index. FS Compare and Repair therefore makes the process far faster, far more time and resource efficient, and far less disruptive.

With FS Compare and Repair, when discrepancies are detected, users can drill down and see the exact record, key, and field column for both source and target. If only one partition is found to have incorrect data, and only five records within that partition need to be resolved, FS Compare and Repair can correct only that partition and only the five specific records within that partition. If only 1% of the blocks within a partition need to repaired, the solution will only take 1% of the time that alternative utilities would require, because those alternatives would require the repair of the entire partition. Further, with these other utilities, teams would have to reload the entire target file and find a quiet time in which they could take the app offline and carry out the repairs.

Flexible Deployment

FS Compare and Repair offers several features that provide teams a great deal of flexibility in deployment and operation:

• Flexible configuration. Teams can use wildcards to span a range of files, partitions, and indexes.
• Flexible comparisons. Users can do comparisons across systems, even those that have different versions and physical structures.
• Flexible repair. FS Compare and Repair supports two types of repair modes: Record repair and block repair. With record repair, the target database is repaired by applying record or row inserts, deletes, and updates. With block repair, the target is repaired by updating file blocks.

Plus, with FS Compare and Repair, teams have complete deployment flexibility. DBAs can quickly repair partitions and indexes in their HPE NonStop Enscribe files, OSS files, and SQL tables, including both SQL/MP and SQL/MX.

Conclusion

Now, doing file comparisons and repairs doesn’t have to be a laborious, resource-intensive, and lengthy exercise. With FS Compare and Repair, DBAs can quickly, easily, and efficiently do comparisons—and immediately repair issues when they arise. To learn more, be sure to visit the FS Compare and Repair page.

Learn more about FS Compare and Repair and all other TANDsoft solutions at www.tandsoft.com, or call us at +1 (514) 695-2234.