This document provides a list of the changes between versions 2008.2.4 and 2008.2.5 for Caché and Ensemble.

Topics include:

• General Announcements
• Restricted Rights Legend
• InterSystems News, Alerts, and Advisories
• Online Documentation
• Description of a Change Report
• Change Reports for This Maintenance Kit

Customers running on any prior released version of Caché may upgrade to this version of Caché during installation. When upgrading across multiple versions, intermediate upgrade steps may be necessary depending on the inter-release compatibility requirements. The release notes for the intervening releases will contain that information.

After each upgrade step, the following conditions apply:

The following guidelines apply to the process of upgrading ECP configurations:

If you have questions or concerns about how to upgrade your ECP configuration, please contact InterSystems Worldwide Customer Support.

Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013.

When acquired by the Government, commercial computer software and related documentation bearing this legend are subject to the following:

1. Title to and ownership of the software and documentation shall remain with the Contractor.
2. Use of the software and documentation shall be limited to the facility for which it is acquired.
3. The Government shall not provide or otherwise make available the software or documentation, or any portion thereof, in any form, to any third party without the prior written approval of the Contractor. Third parties do not include prime contractors, subcontractors and agents of the Government who have the Government's permission to use the licensed software and documentation at the facility, and who have agreed to use the licensed software and documentation only in accordance with these restrictions. This provision does not limit the right of the Government to use software, documentation, or information therein, which the Government has or may obtain without restrictions.
4. The Government shall have the right to use the computer software and documentation with the computer for which it is acquired at any other facility to which that computer may be transferred; to use the computer software and documentation with a backup computer when the primary computer is inoperative; to copy computer programs for safekeeping (archives) or backup purposes; and to modify the software and documentation or combine it with other software. Provided that the unmodified portions shall remain subject to these restrictions.

From time to time, InterSystems publishes items of immediate importance to users of our software. These include alerts, mission critical issues, important updates, fixes, and release announcements.

The most current list can be obtained from the InterSystems Website.

Users should check this list periodically to obtain the latest information on issues that may have an effect on the operation of their site.

As a convenience to our users, InterSystems provides online access to documentation for recent product versions at the InterSystems Website. From the home page, choose the Support & Education tab, then choose the Support menu item for the product you are interested in, for example, Caché Support. Links to the available documentation can be found on the support page for each product.

To help you assess the impact of this maintenance kit on your applications, the remaining topics in this document describe each modification in detail.

If you need assistance evaluating the effect on your application(s), system(s), or related plans, please contact the InterSystems Worldwide Support Center:

• Phone:  +1  617  621-0700
• Fax:  +1  617  734-9391
• Email:  support@intersystems.com

This change corrects a problem where Caché would loop during shutdown attempting to purge configuration backup files older than one year.

When upgrading Ensemble, the application definitions for each of the Ensemble-enabled namespaces was being over-written. In the case where the user had modified settings such as resource required, matching roles, description, timeout, these modifications would be lost upon an upgrade.

Now if the CSP application for the Ensemble Portal of a namespace already exists, the upgrade process opens its definition and only sets the properties listed below, keeping the previous values for all other properties:

• CookiePath
• LockCSPName
• NameSpace
• Path
• Recurse
• ServeFiles
• UseCookies
• LoginPage

The upgrade process now also logs distinct messages for the case when a CSP application is created and when it is updated. Only the properties that are explicitly set are listed in the installation/upgrade log.

Microsoft VC2008 SP1 redistributable packages have been updated to include ATL security update.

This change replaces the method called when errors are detected by the TSQL parser so that they are reported accurately.

This change corrects a situation where, in rare conditions, the ECP daemons might be out of sync and search for locally cached blocks incorrectly causing an unexpected delay in responding to various requests.

On HP-UX Itanium virtual memory was not being deallocated correctly. This became apparent when using %XML.Adaptor::XmlExportToString().

This is change corrects that error.

An optimization was added identifying cases where fields in certain views mentioned in a query were not actually essential to processing the query, resulting in improved access path selection and improved run-time performance for certain queries.

When inserting or updating a row into a table that has a foreign key, Caché acquires a lock on the referenced row that is released when the transaction ends. If there are many rows inserted or updated in a single transaction, and many foreign keys on the table, this could hold a lot of locks in the lock table. This lock is required to check the referential integrity of the foreign key constraint and ensure the row still exists from the time the lock is acquired until the time this row is inserted or updated.

With this change, Caché will no longer hold the lock for the duration of the transaction, but will release the lock after the row has been inserted or updated. By this time, referential integrity is assured and the row in the referenced table cannot be updated or deleted during the course of this transaction because the referential action on the foreign key constraint will prevent an update or delete on the referenced table from occurring. Since this process still has a lock on this table, a referential action of SET NULL, SET DEFAULT, or CASCADE cannot occur until the updating/deleting process can acquire the lock on this table.

This change corrects a situation where the processing of an error could overflow the space allotted for the stack and cause Caché to abort.

This change updates the functions used to detect and count cpus and cores to account for new chipsets, hyperthreading, and other hardware details. Specifically,

• There is now a central function responsible for processor detection.
• The detection algorithm for x86 Windows and Linux processors has been improved.
• The detection of Itanium cores and HT is still limited to Montecito chipsets. No information was found for Montvale.
• On Solaris platforms, the code that counts the number of cores and cpus for licensing purposes now only counts those that are on-line.
• AIX information is now obtained from the operating system for AIX5.2 and AIX 5.3.
• For Solaris systems on chipsets other than x86, the cpu clock and model description are obtained from the operating system.
• The algorithm now correctly accounts for the presence of HyperThreading Technology on recent Intel x86 chips (Nehalem-based).
• The algorithm for counting cpu cores has been updated for Nehalem-based systems running Windows and Linux (Core i7, Xeon 3000, 5500 7400 series), and MacOS X (Core i7)

This change resolves a defect where a process could get blocked in a USE command by the operating system and cause a Caché hang if it has retained ownership of a global buffer.

This change fixes a situation where trying to OPEN a TCP device with the letter "Q" in the hostname was failing with an <UNIMPLEMENTED> error. This was due to a faulty check for a "pipe" on VMS.

This change fixes a problem where a delock command (L -^A) might skip its operation and leave the entry in lock table.

The Cache Diagnostic Report was using an unsupported option for the process list on HP-UX. This has been fixed.