White Star Software

09/10/2026

For most of its life, ProTop has been the quiet reason nothing went catastrophically wrong in an OpenEdge environment. That kind of value is real, but it is easy to underestimate when the only visible outcome is "nothing broke."

As we started designing the agent, the conversation shifted from "how do we monitor better" to "how do we make ProTop add so much value that people rely on it every day, not just when something breaks." The goal was to move from something that feels like a vitamin to something that behaves like medicine.

Episode 4 walks through what that actually means: turning the morning flood of alerts into one clear briefing, and building an agent that learns how experienced DBAs think so it can keep adding value over time.

ProTop had always been a 'vitamin': quietly valuable, easy to underrate. Here's how the team decided to turn it into medicine instead.

08/24/2026

By the time we started talking seriously about an AI agent inside ProTop, nobody on the team was coming in cold. Everyone had their own history with these tools, including early experiments that failed and a few that quietly changed how they worked.

A CEO who saw AI as the second big upheaval after the internet. A CTO who went from “thank you for nothing” to “I cannot do my job without this.” A product manager running side projects just to see which tools would hold up under real use.

Episode 3 brings those stories together and shows how the team’s lived experience with AI shaped the design choices behind ProTop’s agent, long before any production code was written. ⬇️

https://bit.ly/3SRLMpn

08/21/2026

"Someone asked me which is better for OpenEdge. AWS or Azure? AMD or Intel?
My honest answer: I didn't know.

So I found out. And the answer isn't what most people expect.

If you care about where your $/€ actually goes, catch my session at PUG Challenge Providence in October and PUG Challenge Amsterdam in November.

Follow PUG Challenge Americas and PUG Challenge Conference for what's coming."
– Paul Koufalis, CEO

08/11/2026

A founder in Paul’s peer group had already sold his last company for a quarter of a billion dollars, then rebuilt a new one around an AI system that listens to conversations and quietly does the work in the background.

When he walked White Star’s community through what he had built, his message was blunt: if you believe AI can replace your software, someone will either do it to you or you will do it to yourself. There is no neutral option.

Episode 2 is about the moment that argument landed for ProTop, why “we can wait and see” stopped being a reasonable stance, and how that conversation reset the timeline for everything we are building.

🔗

A quarter-billion-dollar exit, a fully agentic rebuild, and one blunt warning convinced White Star Software's CEO the AI shift couldn't wait.

08/10/2026

📝If you've only got 15 minutes a day for OpenEdge monitoring, spend it here:

• Review last night's story — scan alerts and metrics for anything that fired overnight
• Check for contention — long-running transactions and blocked connections, current alerts and activities
• Watch the trends — flag anything trending abnormally (growth rate, unusual heavy read activity, etc.)
• Confirm the basics are healthy — backups completed, disk space is sane

That's the short list that catches most problems before they become incidents. ⚠️

08/08/2026

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08/07/2026

An ecosystem doesn't fail all at once. One species disappears, then another, and the whole thing is unstable before anyone notices.

Your OpenEdge stack works the same way: a slow disk, a growing lock table, a job that's taken 40% longer every month for a year.

ProTop shows you the slow changes, not just the outages. Here's how to keep your OpenEdge stack healthy from the start. →  https://bit.ly/4wI7YRt

08/04/2026

When we gathered for a company summit in Boston last fall, building artificial intelligence into ProTop was not on the agenda. But that changed faster than anyone expected.

If we are going to build AI into ProTop, we would rather you see the thinking from the inside instead of just reading a launch announcement later. This is the first chapter in a series that lets you watch us build an AI agent into ProTop in real time, including the arguments, the doubts, and the moments where the plan shifts.

Episode 1 pulls you into the workshop that turned AI from a side idea into something we could no longer ignore, and shows why that simple exercise ended up deciding ProTop’s future.

▶️https://bit.ly/4fURJJO

When White Star Software's product team was given thirty minutes to imagine ProTop's future, four teams working independently all landed on the same idea. Episode 1 of a 12-part series on building AI into ProTop.

07/30/2026

Some of the best OpenEdge knowledge in the world exists because DBAs share what they've learned with each other, not because it's written in a manual.

Today's as good a day as any to thank whoever answered your last "does anyone know why this is happening" post.