Product
Caroline Briaud

Boost your performance with the new cache manager

The 4D v16 version has definitely been designed for better performance and scalability. In addition to major features like preemptive multi-threading, 4D v16 64-bit is embedding a brand new cache manager for a optimized handling of objects in cache memory avoiding any fragmentation issues.

The new cache manager improves the usage of very large cache for modern computers (with 64 or even 128 GB of Cache) allowing to take advantage of low RAM prices to have even large databases fully in memory. It also improves the situation of small cache size with very large data files, by decreasing the amount of unloading memory with increased support of priorities for data objects to be hold or released from cache.

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Product
Caroline Briaud

Go further with Object fields

Object fields introduced with v15 allows unstructured data bases, similar to schemaless database (NoSQL). 4D v16 goes a big step further. Get a dynamic structure for unstructured data… Confused?

Imagine you use an object field to allow your customers to store custom data, where they can create their own fields. This works well and is one of the most interesting reasons for using an object field. The problem is, how to allow your customer to query this unstructured data? You don’t know which ‘fields’ they used, you cannot build a query editor on top or offer a drop down with used values.

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

Database mirroring

When integrating the log file, 4D stops at the first error and doesn’t return any error message. Reasons for integration errors could be a damaged log, by example because of a bad hard disk or software error during writing. If that error happens at the end, no problem; but it could also be at the start or in the middle of the log. In this case, the data after the error might be useful.

Now, when the integration fails in standard mode, you can try integration in auto-repair mode. In this case, 4D tries to resolve the error encountered, doesn’t stop the integration, and returns the error list.

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

JSON export for Journal

In 4D applications, the data file is important, so all the activity of the database is stored in the log file. As you all know, the log file is a vital element for the restoration of your database following an unfortunate contingency. However all the information on the database activity may also be useful for analysis. For example, to check the activity on a table, to see the changes made by a user, and to follow a record’s history.

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Product
Caroline Briaud

Report duplicates in unique fields

In 4D v15 R3, the way to detect duplicates in fields declared as unique has been enhanced so that users have a mean to know which are the offending fields.

What’s new? All the offending fields are now displayed in an error message or in the log.

Duplicates can be reported through 2 different ways:

  • when 4D needs to create indexes on a database with offending fields.
  • during an MSC Verify scan.

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

Avoid the “Select data file” dialog to show up for a new deployed app

When you deploy an application to your customer, either a merged 4D Server or Single User application, 4D usually opens the “Select data file” dialog. This happens because for an updated solution 4D cannot find the position of the last used data file, as you just replaced the old structure. And for a first time usage, 4D does not know where you would like to create the data file – so it asks for the location.

This dialog, as the very first interaction with your application, might be confusing for the customer. And the verification for the data file happens before the On Startup is executed, before your code has a chance to select another file. To avoid this, 4D v15 introduces a new feature, named Default Data.

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