Introducing OpenEdge 11.1 (Part 1 of 4): Multi-tenancy Enhancements

Today, we announced our latest release of the OpenEdge application development and deployment platform, version 11.1.  OpenEdge 11.1 delivers new enhancements and benefits across what Progress Software calls the “Seven Keys to Success” for enabling our customers and partners to build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device, and any Cloud. Some of the most valuable enhancements in OpenEdge 11.1 specifically address:

• Multi-tenancy - Enhanced governing and management controls

• Productivity - Updated developer tools to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market
• Operational Excellence – (a.k.a. Performance) Improved performance and scalability of the database
• Security & Compliance - Simplified user authentication and centralized controls

Multi-tenancy Enhancements

With OpenEdge 11.0, Progress made the development and deployment of multi-tenant applications faster and easier by taking nearly all of the cost-intensive aspects of multi-tenancy and making them transparent to the application provider. The newest release of OpenEdge 11.1 builds on that foundation, delivering multi-tenancy enhancements that dramatically reduce administration overhead and improve application performance, all while keeping customer data physically separated and secure. OpenEdge 11.1 multi-tenancy enhancements include:

1. Multi-tenant governors:  In a multi-tenant application, you as the application owner might want to limit the resources used by each tenant. OpenEdge 11.1 allows two new ways to limit resources: 1.) by users per tenant (-n), and 2.) by record locks per tenant (-L). These capabilities let you customize the number of concurrent users (by tenant) that are allowed to access a database.  Both of these limits could always be set on the database as a whole, but if you have a shared or SaaS environment, you would want to prevent a single tenant from consuming all the database resources. These new governors allow you to set a maximum for how many resources any one of the tenants can consume.
2. Enhanced multi-tenant tooling in the OpenEdge Explorer Data Administration Console. OpenEdge 11.1 introduces several new capabilities to OpenEdge Explorer’s Data Administration Console, making it easier to manage tenants. These include the ability to rename tenants, tenant groups, and/or tenant domains; the ability to dump and load tenant data; and an improved user interface for filtering and batching large datasets. Tenant partition management is also made much easier with the addition of drag-and-drop support. OpenEdge Explorer also includes the ability to manage the new multi-tenant governors described above.
3. SQL support for tenant groups. OpenEdge 11.0 introduced the concept of tenant groups that allow certain data in certain tables to be shared by multiple tenants. That is, two users, who are part of different ‘tenant’ organizations, could do a query or update data, and the results would be seen by all tenants in the group (and not others).  In OpenEdge 11.1 , this functionality is now also available to SQL clients. This is particularly useful for supporting reporting and access by external tools to your tenanted application.
4. Super-tenant SQL access to LOB data. This is an additional feature that brings SQL access to multi-tenant databases up to par with the ABL access. Super-tenancy gives a specific user the ability to access data that is specific to a particular tenant or group, and to update or modify data as if they were a particular tenant. The ability to access Large Objects (LOB) from SQL as a super-tenant has been completed in OpenEdge 11.1 in order to bring the SQL capabilities up to the native access in the ABL.

Over the following weeks, my technical peers will be diving into other valuable OpenEdge 11.1 enhancements focused on productivity, operational excellence and security & compliance. Until then, please feel free to contact me with any questions -- wood@progress.com.