Hi Progress Audience,
I'm fairly new to this platform (OpenEdge RDBMS 10.2B), and while I do have a large library of documentation (in PDF format), I cannot for some reason find any specific information pertaining to the lock file (denoted by .lk extension). My current educated guess is that it is some type of physical flag that is used for validation/diagnostic purposes. I think that if a database fails and the lock file is still present, the next time the database attempts to load (with the old lock file being present), it will force it to go into recovery mode. All the knowledge I have on this particular subject is from word of mouth (colleagues I work with), but I am unable to find any official documentation on the subject. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
P.S - As I previously mentioned, I have a PDF (start.pdf) which allows me access to a wide variety of PDFs specifically for 10.2B, but I am either unable to find information in here, or it is stored elsewhere.
The .lk file indicates that the DB is in use.
A single-user client or the DB broker create this file (if not already existing) and keeps a file lock on it. This is how other processes find out that the DB is in use.
Thanks for your reply, Mike.
But can you tell me where you obtained the source of that information? I am currently working on some documentation and have to be quite specific on the details. Thank you.
Existence of the .lk file indicates that something is using the database. Normally the file is deleted when the database server is shut down or the singleuser session ends. But in the event of a crash, the file will not be deleted.
The .lk file contains three things:
operating mode of the database (singleuser, multiuser, utilities)
process id of user if singleuser or process id of database broker if multiuser
hostname of machine the database is being used on
Thank you, Mike! That was exactly what I was looking for. I searched the knowledgebase, but for some reason the article would not appear.