Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Agile - user stories

« on: May 21, 2012, 02:43:10 am »

Get the Agile add-in.

2

Suggestions and Requests / Make the grid view act like a true spreadsheet

« on: May 21, 2012, 02:41:50 am »

Most users work with spreadsheets to begin requirements.  Could we get this into the tool directly?

For grid view, it should act like its an Excel spreadsheet interface.

3

Suggestions and Requests / DB Log tasks, date/time stamping

« on: April 18, 2012, 08:17:07 am »

This is a really easy ask.  When the DB Transfer process writes to the "log file", could you add a date/time stamp for each activity line being written to the log?  This helps us understand timing better and how long activities have taken.

Thanks,
Bill

4

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Needed full search capabilities for the HTML

« on: February 06, 2012, 10:52:42 am »

Right, we are running on servers.  Basic html searching for model content is missing.

5

Suggestions and Requests / Needed full search capabilities for the HTML

« on: February 05, 2012, 08:52:31 pm »

Hi, after EA tool dumps out the HTML files, then loading up the model on a web page, we really need the ability to search for material across the full model.  The only way to do this today is to go into each and every tree level, expand it, then perform the search.

This is a terrible experience.

Could we get a "Search Model" field/box added to the basic model HTML files?  Or a tutorial on how to add this to all output HTML files?  We really need to be able to customize the HTML output for our business needs and corporate standards.

Thanks again.
B

6

General Board / Re: Oracle 11g serious slow performance issues

« on: May 20, 2012, 01:43:27 pm »

Geert,

Thank you very much for your help.  I did find an ODBC tracer that I could see the EA SQL calls going through the Oracle odbc driver.  I think that the schema needs better work for Oracle sites and the repeated 'SELECT * from tablename' when the project is loaded objects are requested to work on are not helping performance at all.  These are extremely inefficient compared to requesting the real field data items only when the front end app actually needs the data.

Our DBAs indicate the requests are coming in and out so fast they can barely 'see them' process.  Our db servers are in different geographic cities for business resumption reasons.

To give an idea of the experience, launch the database, and loading our model will take approximately 2-4 minutes to just be able to click on an object in the project library.  Clicking on a library element and pulling up properties is 10-30 seconds.  Running any kind of RTF report (canned supplied by EA), is a click and go get some lunch ordeal.

Does anyone know if there is a debug option for this tool to turn on full tracing and dump it to a file?

I also noticed a strong inefficiency in the schema itself, with many key fields far down into the table, and many behind CLOB type fields.  The schema really needs to be normalized and I think performance across the entire tool when using a RDBMS would significantly go up.

We were hoping for some tuning advice on a 11g server, but it's starting to look like network/EA software latency potentially with the combination of a poor Oracle odbc driver is really hurting us.  Do you know anyone that has built a OCI Oracle extension for db access to make a straighter db call?

The only tuning that we could see out of explain plans and looking at other server stats was to increase the cursors count limits.  I'm also curious if the tool is somehow turning on db hints, which it should not be.

I'm fairly frustrated, as this is a wonderful product but we are using the top database in the market of Oracle, the EA product looks very negative and I'm afraid our full roll out efforts are going to cancelled when people see how slow the response it.

Our current start up main repository project stats are roughly 18k elements.  A small to mid size effort that will continue to grow by a factor of 10 fold over the next 12 months - if we ever get this db performance fixed.  We are right in the middle of our core team setup / launch process trying to move our entire Arch staff into this tool environment...emphasize trying.  We were ready to pull the trigger on the license orders until we ran into this major problem.

We are trying a last resort of using the WAN Optimizer, and want to get it on the same subnet/geo-location as the Oracle 11g server but I have little confidence that this is going to resolve much.

This product is going to be limited to smaller shop installs unless there is a strong focus on fixing Oracle based installations quickly.  It's frustrating.

Thanks as always for your kind responses.

7

General Board / Oracle 11g serious slow performance issues

« on: May 11, 2012, 05:41:36 pm »

Hi,

Some background:
I have recently been successful in moving our company (Sprint Nextel) into using EA as their primary arch tool.  We have just begun the initial deployment of 32 seats and targeted our backend using our production 11g Oracle db (using a grid).  During the pilot phase of our search for a tool, I used a production MySql server instance since it was readily available.

What we have found is that the performance using the Oracle schema (and patch file) from EA for the Oracle db is pretty much a show stopper for our deployment.  We need and want to use Oracle as our backend.  We have major investments to produce 5 9s production support levels.  However, the response time is almost a 10x factor slower than the MySql db.  For example, simply loading up the model (lazy load / 512mb config) on any client, is somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes.  Running a simple report for a perhaps 10 elements (requirements and a diagram) is about 5 minutes.

We've had our DBA's look for issues, see none on the DB side.

Key questions that we really need help with:
a) Is anyone else running an Oracle 11g instance successfully with EA 9.3?
b) If so, what tuning did you need to do to obtain acceptable response times
c) Could you share your experience with us.  Again we are in a roadblock scenario since the DB performance is so poor, it causes the use of the tool to be extremely unattractive.
d) No, we cannot run locally and then upload at later times.  We are expected to run in a federated model.  Single schema backend DB, multiple projects in the schema.

We've tried everything, and don't see anything visible on the ODBC traces or Oracle traces.  It's just slow.  I have even tried switching to other claimed 'faster' ODBC drivers.  No luck.

The irony here is that the MySql server works beautifully.  Performance is very snappy despite it being a small Production box.  I was expecting the reverse that MySql small prod box would be slow, and Oracle would blow it away.  We cannot deploy on MySql unfortunately.

Any help appreciated.  Thank you very much for your time to read this.

Bill McCracken
Sprint Nextel
[email protected]

8

General Board / Re: ORA-02289

« on: May 23, 2012, 01:15:37 pm »

Thanks for your reply. The problem was caused because the EA user did not have the CREATE SEQUENCE privilege at the point when the first project transfer was carried out. I granted this privilege then did another test project transfer and the user now has 19 sequences.
   

Just a tip - we also noticed on our Oracle install that the Cursors needed some tuning.  Be sure and check this.
http://www.orafaq.com/node/758

9

General Board / Re: ORA-02289

« on: May 23, 2012, 01:14:12 pm »

I'm no Oracle specialist but EA users need to be granted almost all rights except to create/delete tables.

q.

This is not correct - our installation have basic rights for users and they are operating with normal workflow, albeit slow on oracle 11g.

10

General Board / Re: Use Case Scenario to Structured Scenario

« on: May 23, 2012, 01:08:46 pm »

Yeah, this works perfectly - it's how we snap them in from older docs.  make sure to delete the notes tab after you create the structured version.  Otherwise your output specs will show both.

11

General Board / DB transfer long times

« on: April 18, 2012, 07:20:23 am »

Has anyone found tips/techniques to speed up DB transfers?  

I'm uploading to a Production Oracle DB farm (many servers) and the duration of the local model (.EAP) to the Oracle repository is well over 2 hours.  This seems unreasonable.  The model is about medium size and not overly complex.  Is there any tuning that can be done besides the obvious backend dropping / rebuilding of index.  BTW, I couldn't if I wanted to due to Oracle permission issues with the DBAs who won't let this happen.

t_objects table alone is taking well over an hour to 2 hours.

Ideas?

Thanks,
B

12

General Board / Re: Custom SQL (Search) into a RTF report

« on: July 19, 2011, 02:18:39 pm »

Hi, thank you for helping.  However, the suggestion does not work.

I have my SearchName set to the match my predefined Search (with SQL).  Created a "blank" RTFTemplate (and also used a basic template) and the report still generates no output.  Also set the CLASSGUID and CLASSTYPE as suggested in other threads as the first two fields, plus my own fields.

I believe the problem is that the RTF generator is looking for tag items out of the SQL query to apply to the template as 'input'.  Rather, I'm just wanting the output of the SQL to drop into a "blank report" to show my query.  If the query builder had a good output capability, I could use it, but it doesn't.  It would be nice to be able to put into master documents a "status type report" based on my own SQL into my report.

Ideas?

thanks again,
Bill

13

General Board / Custom SQL (Search) into a RTF report

« on: July 17, 2011, 06:10:21 pm »

Has anyone found a trick to using a custom SQL search (output) and putting it into an RTF file?

I have a SQL query that I want to include into my report, and haven't found a way to do it.  

There seems to be no way to add a db SQL call to a RTF template.

Ideas?

14

General Board / Re: Microsoft Visio - stupid question?

« on: May 18, 2011, 02:56:53 am »

Nope.

You can paste images into EA from the clipboard.

Visio doesn't support object tracking (natively) so this would be quite difficult for EA to bind a Visio object.

For example EA uses GUID for object, and Visio doesn't....Visio - you have to build properties against the object and then assign a value.

15

General Board / Re: Save contents of windows to file (Relationship

« on: May 18, 2011, 01:55:30 am »

No help or comments from Sparx tech support?