Monday, April 23, 2012

Ongoing Woes with Pervasive Data Integrator 10

UPDATE: 2012-05-08

Pervasive tracked me down to where I work (they have even been inspecting my LinkedIn profile) and complained to the company I work for expecting them to lean on me to remove my blog. Apparently they don't like that I have been blogging about the technical defects in their product and that I find their support to be sluggish (save for the fact that they have at least 1 great support person I was eventually able to track down, that's been very sympathetic to our Pervasive Data Integrator issues).

Fortunately I am employed by a magnificent company, run by a benevolent and just CEO who believes in and respects freedom of speech (provided it's fair and based on accurate data). Since everything I've blogged about these Pervasive issues is substantiated by emails and documentation I have no reason to remove my blog. The information is accurate as of when the blog was first posted. To be fair, I have also gone back and noted some things they have fixed.

That being said, I did however remove a non-technical post which I used to have on this page. It was simply a non-technical blog about me ranting over my horrendous support experiences with Pervasive. Out of deep respect for my employer, I will keep my posts about Pervasive's Data Integrator on technical matters.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Pervasive DI Update for version 10.2.4.39

Although not officially released yet, we got early access to version 10.2.4.39 which is supposed to resolve a grave error in XML schema validation. Unfortunately that version does not resolve the bugs they said it resolves. Mind you, they gave us this version specifically because it was supposed to fix the bug.

To make matters worse, I'm finding that there are even more bugs. For example you can't use the built-int LogMessage function from within your own UDF. You wont get any errors. It will just not log anything but instead just silently fail.

With this new version also, we have found that half the time, downloading process logs will give you some HTML mark-up (for wrapping some Flash code) instead of the actual logs you're trying to get to. As a result we've had to come up with yet another kludge - write our own logging mechanism.

What did they fix since the last time I blogged about this broken product. Well, you can actually get back to a running job in the Integration Manager and stop it if it's currently running. Unfortunately you still can't control jobs in the queued. i.e. there is no way to remove an individual job that has been queued. Not even removing it from the schedule will remove it from the queue. To make that issue worse, if you need to run a job immediately it will place it in the queue behind the jobs which have already been queued - regardless of when those other jobs in the queue are scheduled to run. So imagine this scenario: We have a job scheduled to run at 6PM and another at 9PM. Someone in the company decides that they want to run 3rd job that is normally scheduled to run at the end of the month, ... now. No harm will come from running it early, we just want to run it earlier than normal. So we click the "Run the integration immediately" button and expect it run immediately, right?

Nope. Instead for some odd reason it queues the job. So I have to tell the supervisor who requested the ETL to hang tight till tomorrow because PDI decided the "immediately" means "queue" for later.