Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Trivan Pal <[email protected]> · Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:07:15 +0100

Hello Bob,

Indeed yes, with the caveat that it cannot really be considered as a relational design in all cases. This has been and continues to be an arduous task.

The SLS RDB effort can be characterized by being a bottom-up approach (with all the implications, mostly inconveniences), serving the controls, beam dynamics, beam lines, hardware ...etc,  groups.

To document the salient features of all above in this forum is probably not appropriate. Thus, I shall take the liberty to email you separately, in due course. I would leave it to your good judgment to post it in
an appropriate forum, if you judge the contents worthwhile.

It remains, however, my fervent belief that statements from the 'experts' in the field concerning the requirements for applications must be made ,  be it for the E-R model or for the GUI's or the command line
scripts (to then be implemented  by the DB programmer(s)). At the risk of moralizing, this cannot be overemphasized.

We at the SLS controls, have singularly not succeeded in this aspect. I assume my responsibility here.

Notwithstanding, the SLS RDB infrastructure and application-oriented utilities are routinely used and even indispensable in some cases. However, these are in my opinion superfluous. On the other hand, useful
concepts of an RDB such as maintaining and generating config. files for e.g. the Epics Extensions and CDEV DDL have been discontinued in favour of using CVS.

Likewise, the CDEV-Oracle gateway written by JLab and SLS (to extend the device property paradigm to hold static information) has been abandoned.

Respectfully yours,

Trivan Pal
PSI/SLS
--

"Dalesio, Leo `Bob`" wrote:

> Hi Trivan,
> I recall that you were designing an RDB for the SLS. How is that coming along? Are there EPICS databases defined in there? Is it in use for the physics data?
> The LCLS is looking for RDB's from which to start.
> Thanks,
> Bob
>

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System