March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC RDB and EPICS The World According to SLAC Ideas and Implementations by: J. Rock, D. Rogind, S. Allison

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC History of attempts Old SLC system –Controls database is a collection of flat files –Cabling and maintenance databases not complete PEP-II (mid ’90s) –Started late –Some EPICS (first at SLAC) –Odd collection with duct tape and wire SPEAR –Small project; limited goals LCLS –The chance to do it right; mostly EPICS

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC SPEAR’s Way DEC RDB (not ORACLE or MySQL) IOCs report PV information on boot PV information includes INP/OUT Used to resolve mix ups

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC LCLS Future Looking for an RDB person Naming convention meeting as we speak –Steve Lewis has joined from LLNL Looking to do as much as possible Central PV help just a beginning Interested in our outcome

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC ESD Software (our part) Need good up-to-date list of PVs Needs to include “other” system Management of secondary data important –Archiver data –Channel Watcher data (save/restore) –Alarm Handler data

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC Other System Has EPICS version of name Code to generate list worked once Fairly static now

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC Secondary Systems Not just record names, but fields –Save/Restore might want.LOPR, for example Ease of choosing names –Singly –In groups by pattern Ease of setting parameters –Singly –In groups by pattern

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC Notes from Judy –The UI we need: Is convenient, easy to use, intuitive. Is probably web-based. Allows mass import of data Allows field-by-field editing Allows update of groups of things, with as many cut/paste/filldown/automatic options as possible Has plenty of reports so we can easily see and communicate what we have in the db structure. Maps easily into our normal view of the data (i.e. we need to easily identify and manipulate an epics.db or template, an alarm tree, a channel list.) Has security (one or more levels)

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC ESD RDB Use Startup file crawling to produce Old method for old system data Tools to get secondary data right Generation of secondary data files LCLS may want.db generation too We also have cable databases and, in principle, power drawings

March 9-11 IRMISRon Chestnut SLAC Tools I like to talk about –Functionality –Tables –Reports –Generating configuration files Task groups end up talking about –Which web tools? –Formal Oracle or ad-hoc generation