Progress OpenEdge Database Administrator

Job Description

Job Title:  Progress Open Edge Database AdministratorContract Type: Fixed term contract 18 monthsSalary:  £47,596 Per annum (£52,606 is achieved after 12 months successful performance in the role)Working Hours: 35 Hours per week Working Pattern: Monday-Friday/HybridLocation: Liverpool

If you share our values and are excited about making a significant impact at Riverside, please ensure you attach a current CV and covering letter. At Riverside we recruit to potential not just on skills and experience, so we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all the essential criteria on the job description.

The difference you will make as a Progress Open Edge Database Administrator

You will Own the stability, performance, security, and lifecycle of Progress OpenEdge databases and the Pro2 replication estate. You will design, build, tune and operate mission-critical Progress environments (PASOE/AppServer-backed) and ensure robust data movement into downstream systems (e.g., SQL Server/Snowflake) through Pro2 for analytics, integration, and reporting. You will be the subject-matter expert for OpenEdge database internals, after-imaging, backup/recovery, and replication patterns, enabling high availability, business continuity, and secure-by-design operations.

About you

We are looking for someone with 
•    Proven experience, including proutil, rfutil, dbanalys, AI/BI management, storage areas, and index maintenance
•    Pro2 expertise: Proven experience deploying and supporting Pro2 replication at scale (thousands+ tables, near real-time SLAs), including trigger management, agent tuning, and conflict handling
•    Performance tuning: Deep understanding of locking, latching, buffer management, scatter/clustering, and workload profiling
•    Backup/DR: Online backups, AI roll-forward, PITR, replication to secondaries; evidence of DR testing and RTO/RPO accountability

Why Riverside?
At Riverside, we’re a housing association with a difference – enhancing the everyday for all our customers. For 90 years, we’ve been revitalising neighbourhoods and supporting communities by providing the homes they need to live full, fulfilling and rewarding lives.
We have a portfolio of over 75,000 affordable residential and retirement homes across the UK. Our work ranges from homelessness services to social care, employment support to retirement living, and we need the best people on board to help us.
Working with us, you’ll enjoy:

•    Competitive pay & generous pension
•    28 days holidays plus bank holidays
•    Flexible working options available
•    Investment in your learning, personal development and technology
•    A wide range of benefits

Diversity and Inclusion at Riverside: 
We are inclusive. At Riverside, we value diversity in all its forms. We foster a workplace where all individuals are respected, empowered, and heard. Our commitment to inclusivity drives our success and enriches the lives of our customers and colleagues. 
Riverside is a Disability Confident Employer and operates a Guaranteed Interview Scheme for any applicant who declares they have a disability. If the applicant meets the minimum requirements for the role (as set out in the role profile and/or person specification) they will be guaranteed an interview.

Applications may close before the deadline, so please apply early to avoid disappointment

Role profile

Core OpenEdge Database Administration
•    Environment ownership: Install, configure, and patch OpenEdge RDBMS (v12+) on the Microsoft Windows platform; maintain PASOE/AppServer where relevant
•    Operational excellence: Manage database startup parameters, AI/BI areas, storage areas, extents, and block/record settings for performance and resilience
•    Backup & recovery: Design and run probkup/prorest strategies (cold, online, incremental); manage AI archiving, roll-forward recovery, and DR runbooks
•    Performance engineering: Baseline and tune buffer pools, latch/lock contention, schema & index design, scatter factor, stats (e.g., dbanalys), index rebuilds, and system-level parameters
•    Capacity & lifecycle: Forecast growth, plan storage and upgrades, and lead version uplift programmes (including PASOE migrations, 12.x+)
•    Monitoring & observability: Implement and maintain monitoring (e.g., ProTop/OpenEdge Management), alerting, and trend analysis; track latency, I/O, and replication health
•    Security & compliance: Enforce least privilege (OpenEdge users/roles, SQL-92 permissions), encryption (at-rest/in-flight), audit trails, data masking where needed; align with GDPR and internal security standards
•    Automation: Script routine operations (PowerShell), implement idempotent provisioning (Ansible/Terraform where applicable), and codify DBA runbooks
•    Incident/problem management: Root cause analysis, major incident support, post-incident reviews, and resilience improvements
•    Documentation: Maintain architecture diagrams, SOPs, DR playbooks, replication maps, and “How we run” service documentation

Pro2 Replication (OpenEdge → RDBMS Targets)
•    Architecture & setup: Design and implement Pro2 topologies (real-time/change-trigger based or batch), ensuring schema mapping, key strategy, and target platform alignment (SQL Server/Oracle/PostgreSQL)
•    Build & configuration: Configure Pro2 components (replication agents/services, brokers, queues), table inclusion/exclusion, transformation rules, and load initial data (seeding)
•    Change capture: Manage trigger-based CDC, maintain trigger health and performance; monitor replication tables, queues, and latency
•    Operations & reliability: Operate Pro2 in production — monitor lag, detect/clear bottlenecks, handle restarts, manage conflict detection/resolution and retries
•    Performance tuning (Pro2): Optimise commit sizing, batching, parallelism, indexing on targets, and network throughput; reduce replication-induced overhead on source
•    Schema evolution: Coordinate schema changes with Pro2 mappings, versioning, and backward compatibility; automate migration steps
•    DR & failover: Align Pro2 with wider HA/DR strategy (e.g., AI shipping, OpenEdge Replication to warm standby, regional failover); test and document failover and backfeed processes
•    Data quality & reconciliation: Implement data checksums, row counts, exception queues, and reconciliation jobs; work with BI/data teams to validate downstream data integrity

Knowledge, Skills and Experience Essential:
•    OpenEdge RDBMS: Proven hands-on Progress DBA experience, including proutil, rfutil, dbanalys, AI/BI management, storage areas, and index maintenance
•    Pro2 expertise: Proven experience deploying and supporting Pro2 replication at scale (thousands+ tables, near real-time SLAs), including trigger management, agent tuning, and conflict handling
•    Performance tuning: Deep understanding of locking, latching, buffer management, scatter/clustering, and workload profiling
•    Backup/DR: Online backups, AI roll-forward, PITR, replication to secondaries; evidence of DR testing and RTO/RPO accountability
•    Scripting & automation: PowerShell; familiar with CI/CD for infra-as-code and runbook automation
•    OS & platforms: Windows Server
•    Networking & security: TLS, certificates, firewalling, least privilege, key management, and audit requirements
•    Tooling: ProTop or OpenEdge Management; experience integrating with Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk/ELK for logs is a plus
•    App server awareness: PASOE/AppServer basics, session model, broker/agent settings, and connection pooling impacts on DB
•    Stakeholder collaboration: Partnering with application teams (ABL/4GL, REST, PASOE), data/BI teams, SecOps, and SRE/Platform
•   Compliance: Understanding of GDPR, data retention, and secure data handling in production

Desirable:

•   OpenEdge Replication (warm standby) administration experience
•   SQL-92 engine tuning and JDBC/ODBC connectivity patterns
•   Target DB depth: Tuning on Microsoft SQL Server
•   Cloud: Running OpenEdge in IaaS; exposure to backup object storage (e.g., S3/Blob), cloud networking, and managed monitoring stacks
•   Automation stack: GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps pipelines
•   Languages: Progress ABL/4GL familiarity for reading code paths impacting DB; Python/Go for ops utilities
•   Certifications: Progress OpenEdge or vendor training; cloud/platform (Azure) certifications
•   Experience of the OpenHousing Housing Management System