It has been very frustrating when the changed Universe 12.1.1 to no allow updating indexes while people are accessing the file. This worked before from 9.6 to 11.3.1 but not 12.1.1. We have clients that run 24/7 and we have to stop our Web-based applications running under Apache Tomcat, make sure no one is using our Eclipse IDE tools and kill any phantom jobs before you use CREATE.INDEX. Otherwise, you get this:
>CREATE.INDEX ACCT.CHECKS BANK.NO NO.NULL

Unable to open "ACCT.CHECKS", file open by other users, exclusive access failed.

Here is what Rocket said in my case:
Advice from our ATS engineer:
Reverting functionality to how it was prior to UniVerse 12.1.1 can cause issues where a newly created and built index can be out of sync if existing users have the file open. As long as our customers acknowledge the risk, we could create a new story which would allow customers to have their installation behave as it was prior to UniVerse 12.1.1 if they choose. This would be something that is configurable.

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Doug Averch (Owner)
U2logic, Inc.
daverch@u2logic.com
303-946-5226 (cell & text)
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Huh.  I was under the assumption that UV 12 took much of the memory structure and things like that away from the individual processes and instead replaced it with a more centralized system.  Because of that, I was actually hoping that UV 12 was going to do a BETTER job of allowing 24x7 shops to be able to service the system without having to take an outage.  We all have understood that doing things when the system was up and running was a potential problem and could cause issues but I would have hoped that Rocket would have worked on addressing the underlying issue with having to take systems offline for every bit of database altering rather than just locking down the "bad" practices and thus forcing more downtime.

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Ryan Ladd
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Huh.  I was under the assumption that UV 12 took much of the memory structure and things like that away from the individual processes and instead replaced it with a more centralized system.  Because of that, I was actually hoping that UV 12 was going to do a BETTER job of allowing 24x7 shops to be able to service the system without having to take an outage.  We all have understood that doing things when the system was up and running was a potential problem and could cause issues but I would have hoped that Rocket would have worked on addressing the underlying issue with having to take systems offline for every bit of database altering rather than just locking down the "bad" practices and thus forcing more downtime.

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Ryan Ladd
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Hi Ryan. You are correct that the 12.1.1 release of UniVerse implements a centralized System Buffer which is used to control file I/O operations. The System Buffer does contain an entry for each UniVerse file that is open. One of the fields is a reference count of users having the file open and this is used to control the exclusive access requirement for certain operations. While the intent of requiring exclusive access on CREATE.INDEX was to avoid issues encountered at previous releases, some customers have found this to be too restrictive as noted by Doug in the original post. We are working on a release which can be configured to revert behavior to previous releases. A prototype has been tested successfully by some customers and we are working on making that available in a future release.
However, to your point of enhancing the system to make it more flexible for 7x24 shops, happy to discuss further in our biweekly calls if you would like.

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Neil Morris
Rocket Software
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