Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tip #4 – Advantage Command Line Switches

Advantage configuration parameters can be set using the Advantage Configuration Utility, by modifying the registry (Windows) or configuration file (Linux and Netware) or using command line switches. These switches can be very useful if you need to start Advantage with a particular configuration for testing. The settings you specify will not be persisted, therefore, starting the service without the switches will revert to the configured settings.

Since Advantage for Windows runs as a service you must run Advantage as an executable to use these switches. This is done by specifying the /exe switch. The following example runs Advantage as an executable with 100 connections, 500 tables, 5000 workareas and 500 indexes.

ads /exe -c100 -d500 -w5000 -i500

The command line switches can be used directly with the Linux and Novell versions of the server. A list of the common configuration switches is below.

Switch Description
-C Number of Connections
-L Number of Data Locks
-I Number of Index Files
-D Number of Tables
-W Number of Work Areas
-T Number of Worker Threads

There are three other command line switches which would rarely be used. Disable Failed Transaction Recovery (-F) will disable the automatic rollback of failed transactions. If the file server fails when a transaction is active the server will automatically roll back any transactions when it starts again. Using the –F flag will leave the transactions in their incomplete state. The Help Screen(-H) command line switch only applies to Advantage Database Server for Netware. It displays a screen with all of the valid command line configuration parameters and the server is not loaded. Finally the Index Sort Buffer Size (-Z) is used when building indexes. If you have very large key sizes in your index you can increase the buffer size to improve sorting performance.

No comments: