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WhereScape is pleased to announce that that WhereScape RED 10.2.0.0is now available.

This release of RED is compatible with WhereScape 3D 9.0 versions and up.

Note
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Before upgrading, review

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the Important Messages when Upgrading from Earlier Versions for more information.

 

Table of Contents
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To review the Release Notes for older versions visit WhereScape Documentation.

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Go

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to  https://www1.wherescape.com

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to see available product

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versions and release notes for older versions.

Log into the WhereScape Support

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Portal to access downloads.

New Features and Improvements 

Customizable Object Subtypes

Configure your Object Subtypes based on the existing object types in RED with the following configurable settings:

  • Name
  • Icon to appear in object trees and documentation
  • Default Routine Templates for automated code generation
  • Appearance in object trees

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This feature is beneficial to customers wanting to differentiate between more object types and control the automation aspects based on those types. It's particularly useful in the case of Data Vaults where there are many object subtypes that can be configured in 3D but don't currently have a dedicated object type mapping in RED such as PIT and Bridge tables. This feature also allows setting specific icons for each object subtype which improves both productivity and look and feel.

Scheduler Improvements

Azkaban core and the RED plugin for Azkaban have been improved in this release to enhance the workflows when dealing with abnormal job runs.

Improved Azkaban/RED synchronization

Azkaban to RED metadata synchronization on aborted jobs has been improved, now when canceling jobs directly from Azkaban the RED job metadata is updated to match the external job state. This removes the need to run additional tasks via Azkaban to have the job removed from the 'Running' state in RED and allows further remedial tasks to be performed on the job run, as required, immediately following an abort.

Added support for cleaning up child processes on job cancellations

When a job is canceled directly from Azkaban an optional cleanup script is now triggered automatically by the presence of a host script object in RED matching a specific naming convention. This is beneficial to users who need to kill long running or abnormal jobs in the scheduler but ensure that the underlying child processes for the job are also killed to prevent further unwanted transactions on the source and targets involved in the task.
Job cancellations will now execute the RED metadata host scripts, if present, named:

  • wsl_scheduler_job_kill_linux on Linux
  • wsl_scheduler_job_kill_win on Windows

Improved job restart workflow

When manually marking a failed task as 'completed' in the RED Scheduler tab for an aborted job, then a restart on this job will now set the job run to 'Succeeded', provided there were no other failures in the remaining tasks to execute. This is useful when resolving a failed task externally and then later continuing the remaining tasks in the job, so that the job then appears as a successful completion in the metadata.

Migrating from Earlier Versions of RED

Note that due to the new PostgreSQL metadata and the external Azkaban-based Scheduler, there is no upgrade path from earlier versions of RED directly to RED 10. Suppose you are an existing customer of WhereScape RED on another metadata platform. In that case, migration tooling will become available soon after this release along with the rollout of procedure-compatible Enablement Packs for selected Target platforms.

WhereScape 3D Compatibility

WhereScape presents RED 10.2 a new version of RED with new capabilities and features to enhance the user experience. This version includes Advanced Authentication Methods.

Advanced Authentication Methods

The Advanced Connect feature provides a new way to manage connection security and modify ODBC connection attributes in RED enabling a wide variety of authentication mechanisms for your metadata, source, and target connections. This feature combines session-based authentication, complete control over ODBC connection strings, and secure encrypted storage of passwords.

This feature is designed with security in mind and adds even more ways for enterprises to secure their metadata, sources, and targets for a wide variety of authentication methods such as OAuth, Azure Active Directory, and multifactor authentication (depending on vendor driver capabilities). Please see the product documentation for more details.

Advanced Connect is always enabled in RED 10.2 and therefore a connection string must be defined for every ODBC, Database and applicable Extensible Source Connections in RED. The connection string will always be used when establishing ODBC connections from this release onwards. RED provides suitable default connection strings when not provided by the user. 

In conjunction with Advanced Connect, RED Profiles are used to store encrypted user specific credentials outside the metadata, for the RED UI these profiles are stored on disk using Windows DPAPI encryption, for the Azkaban Scheduler the profile is stored within a new metadata table in the 'redadmin' schema and encrypted with a new encryption utility provided in this release.

RED Login Screen showing the new fields 'Profile' and 'Connection String':

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RED Connection Properties Screen showing the new Advanced Connect Parameters:

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Stand-alone Script Improvements

Stand-alone scripts can now be associated with Database/ODBC and Extensible Source Connections providing access to the associated connection settings and Credentials in your scripts.

This feature is particularly useful for “High Water Mark” scripts that require access to target connection properties. When combined with Advanced Connect this provides a secure way to run scripts directly against source and target connections in RED. Previously you could only associate Windows or Linux connections to scripts.

Online Documentation

The WhereScape product family is moving towards online product documentation which allows us to keep the documentation more up to date outside of traditional release cycles and continue to make improvements that enable our customers to use our products to their full potential. 

From this release onwards when using the in-product help you will be redirected to our documentation website hosted on https://wiki.idera.com/category/ws. Contextual product help buttons are not yet linked to the relevant pages and instead take you to the landing page, contextual based help links will follow soon. 

For offline documentation requirements you will still be able to download the full user guide PDF's. This release of RED is compatible with WhereScape 3D 8.6.9.1 versions and up for 3D exports to RED but it is recommended to use the latest version 9.0.2.1 of 3D to provide all feature capabilities.

Customer Improvements

This release also includes the customer enhancements and support fixes listed in the following Detailed Changes section.

Detailed Changes in RED 10.2.0.0

The following changes have been implemented since 10.1.0.2

 Improvements

  • RED-11900 Updated the WslMetadataServiceClient.dll to work with the connection string arg. Updated the scheduler integration script to use the metadata connection string. 
  • RED-11895 RED Help (User and Installation Guide) is no longer installed with the product and now links to the online documentation at http://wiki.idera.com/category/ws
  • RED-11829 Azkaban core components and RED Azkaban plugin updated for Advanced Connect feature.
  • RED-11821 Improvements to the Windows Azkaban Scheduler installer to support Advanced Connect with DPAPI encryption. 

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  • RED-11816 Added an encryption utility
  • RED-11813 Moved the RED Scheduler Configuration credentials to the RED Profile.
  • RED-11752 Stand-alone scripts can now be associated with Database and Extensible Source Connections providing access to target settings and credentials
  • RED-11745 Added Advanced Connect feature to RED 10 and forced its usage, this has potentially breaking changes, please refer to the important upgrade messages.