Michigan Muon Production

Database

Shawn McKee

Site Visit

June 1, 2000

http://atwww.physics.lsa.umich.edu/aspdb/um_db.asp

Production Database: What’s it

good for?

• Production feedback: allows finding

problems early

• T he data is required to do proper QA/QC

• Documenting the detector:

– Long term use possi ble for data analysis

– M ay be needed to correlate with future

observed problems

• L ogistics and inventory management can be

easily added

General Strategy

• Track all required production information

• Minimize burden on thos e producing tubes

and chambers

• Automate data acquisi tion wherever

possible to reduce errors and workload

•Create storage schema that match

production data generation

Isolate Production Stations

• E very production operation associated with

a “Station”

• E ach production station runs “locally” (not

dependent on database server)

• D ata is written to formatted text files

• O perator can always abort operations (no

data is written)

• Comments are allowed for each station

Data to Database

• Scheduled or on demand collection of

production data files

• C opy all new data files to database server

disk

• P rocess all new data files and load data to

database

Formatting and Sanity Checking

• Formatted te xt files are checked by the

database server Perl scripts

• Precision formatting is applied where

specified from the database (e .g. 4 decimal

places of precision)

• R ough sanity checks are applied to remove

faulty data (inconsis tent or out of range data

triggers warnings or errors)

Database to User

• O nce the data is loaded into the ACCESS

database we must make it useful

• A CCESS provides a rather poor interface

and requires access directly to the database

server

• We found a solution using the WWW (Via

ADO, Perl and ASP)

WWW Interface to the Database

• A CCESS interface is limited in scope and

accessibility

• W e require multiple different users have

remote access to essential data

• Provides a usef ul, customizable interface

which is dynamic (drilldown, etc.)

• The demonstration at the end of the

presentation will show all the details...

ASP and Other Tools

• A number of tools exist for “publishing” a

database to the web

• Microsoft provides ASP (Active Server

Pages) to allow the easy cr eation of

dynamic web pages

• A DO (ActiveX Data Objects) provides a

high level interface to a database

• Perl can se rve as an Active Scripting Engine

Perl as Parser, Processor and

Presenter

• P erl is a powerful, widely (and freely)

available scripting language

• On Windows, PerlScript exists (ASP)

• A t Michigan, Perl provides the glue for our

data flow

• Perl parses formatted data files

• Per l checks and loads the data

• P erl scripts the dynamic WWW pages

WWW DB Interface Demo

• The proceeding inform ation only gives a

rough context for how the database and

interface function

• T he following demonstration will connect

to the database via the WWW and show

some of it functionality

• This first demo will emphasize data

gathering and tube production

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