Tool construction for the British Airways SEE with the O<inf>2</inf> ODBMS

Software engineering environments (SEE) support the construction and maintenance of large-scale software systems. They integrate tools for the production and maintenance of documents such as requirements definitions, architecture definitions or user manuals. Very few SEE tools meet all the developers' requirements. Some requirements that are important in practice have not been appropriately addressed. These are inter-document consistency handling, version and configuration management and cooperative work. We claim that the reason for current tools not meeting these requirements is the fact that the required database support for maintaining documents is only now becoming available. The British Airways SEE meets these new requirements. Its tools were constructed using the O2 object database management system, which has been extended to become a database management system for software engineering. We discuss the experiences we made during tool construction for this SEE

Software management of the LHC Detector Control Systems

The control systems of each of the four Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments will contain of the order of 150 computers running the back-end applications. These applications will have to be maintained and eventually upgraded during the lifetime of the experiments, ~20 years. This paper presents the centralized software management strategy adopted by the Joint COntrols Project (JCOP) [1], which is based on a central database that holds the overall system configuration. The approach facilitates the integration of different parts of a control system and provides versioning of its various software components. The information stored in the configuration database can eventually be used to restore a computer in the event of failure

A simple approach to shared storage database servers

This paper introduces a generic technique to obtain a shared-storage database cluster from an off-the-shelf database management system, without needing to heavily refactor server software to deal with distributed locking, buffer invalidation, and recovery from partial cluster failure. Instead, the core of the proposal is the combination of a replication protocol and a surprisingly simple modification to the common copy-on-write logical volume management technique: One of the servers is allowed to skip copy-on-write and directly update the original backing store. This makes it possible to use any shared-nothing database server software in a shared or partially shared storage configuration, thus allowing large cluster configurations with a small number of copies of data.(undefined

Upgrading existing databases: recommendations for irrigation districts

Presented during the Third international conference on irrigation and drainage held March 30 - April 2, 2005 in San Diego, California. The theme of the conference was "Water district management and governance."All of the district in the Lower Rio Grande Valley currently store all of their accounting and water delivery records in computer databases. It has been known for several years that these database systems in the Lower Rio Grande Valley are in need of replacement. The current database systems are not compatible with modern software, including GIS and management software. Due to this lack of software compatibility the districts are unable to directly access the historic watering records in their databases. Without access to these records the districts are losing out on a valuable management and decision making tool. To determine the best upgrade option available, we considered the current database requirements of the district, as well as any foreseeable future requirements. We compared the costs and benefits of several free and commercially available database systems, taking into consideration software compatibility, ease of management, operating system requirements, and future software support. Based on our findings we are recommending upgrading to a Windows server running a SQL Server database. This configuration will give the districts the ability to fully utilize there existing datasets, while giving them the ability to be compatible with GIS and other management software.Sponsored by USCID; co-sponsored by Association of California Water Agencies and International Network for Participatory Irrigation Management

Let your fingers do the walking: The projects most invaluable tool

The barrage of information pertaining to the software being developed for a project can be overwhelming. Current status information, as well as the statistics and history of software releases, should be 'at the fingertips' of project management and key technical personnel. This paper discusses the development, configuration, capabilities, and operation of a relational database, the System Engineering Database (SEDB) which was designed to assist management in monitoring of the tasks performed by the Network Control Center (NCC) Project. This database has proven to be an invaluable project tool and is utilized daily to support all project personnel

Tools for distributed application management

Distributed application management consists of monitoring and controlling an application as it executes in a distributed environment. It encompasses such activities as configuration, initialization, performance monitoring, resource scheduling, and failure response. The Meta system (a collection of tools for constructing distributed application management software) is described. Meta provides the mechanism, while the programmer specifies the policy for application management. The policy is manifested as a control program which is a soft real-time reactive program. The underlying application is instrumented with a variety of built-in and user-defined sensors and actuators. These define the interface between the control program and the application. The control program also has access to a database describing the structure of the application and the characteristics of its environment. Some of the more difficult problems for application management occur when preexisting, nondistributed programs are integrated into a distributed application for which they may not have been intended. Meta allows management functions to be retrofitted to such programs with a minimum of effort

Requirement Analysis of a Signal Database for Power Plant Automation Signals

The signal lists used for the control and automation system design of Wärtsilä Power Plants are today made with a spreadsheet software-based configuration tool. The problems with this tool are difficult data maintenance, a large manual workload and traceability of the data of configured signal lists. The maintenance problems are caused by larger power plant sizes, stricter customer requirements and scattered information in different spreadsheet software-files. To solve these problems, a database solution is planned to be developed. In this thesis, the requirements of the database are analyzed, functional descriptions are made and a high-level model of the database solution is created. The main stakeholders of the database system have been identified and interviews have been held with all of them to gather requirements and get information of current problems related to the creation of the signal lists. The development work is done in close cooperation with the Wärtsilä Power Plants R&D department, project management and control system suppliers. Theory of database design and requirements management is collected from scientific literature. This theory is used to identify requirements in the early phases of the database development and in the creation of a conceptual model of the database. The goal was to collect the main requirements, create solutions for current problems and to identify possible solutions for the planned database. The results show the large amount of signal data that is today scattered in different sources. Reasons for problems in power plant project work and control system design have been identified and the main requirements for the database solution have been classified. The planned database functionalities are modelled and possible solutions to fulfill the signal list configuration work are presented. New findings of connectivity to other information systems and lifecycle management of the signal design are brought up to meet future requirements of the power plant signal configuration work.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Selection of a new computer system for Executive Director, Inc.

Executive Director, Inc. (EDI), an association management firm, wants to replace its existing computer system. The new computer system should be able to accommodate all of the database and processing requirements of EDI\u27s eight clients. The three areas of consideration when purchasing this new computer system include the software capabilities, the hardware configuration and vendor support

Software configuration management plan for the Hanford site technical database

The Hanford Site Technical Database (HSTD) is used as the repository/source for the technical requirements baseline and programmatic data input via the Hanford Site and major Hanford Project Systems Engineering (SE) activities. The Hanford Site SE effort has created an integrated technical baseline for the Hanford Site that supports SE processes at the Site and project levels which is captured in the HSTD. The HSTD has been implemented in Ascent Logic Corporation (ALC) Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) package referred to as the Requirements Driven Design (RDD) software. This Software Configuration Management Plan (SCMP) provides a process and means to control and manage software upgrades to the HSTD system

Tools for distributed application management

Distributed application management consists of monitoring and controlling an application as it executes in a distributed environment. It encompasses such activities as configuration, initialization, performance monitoring, resource scheduling, and failure response. The Meta system is described: a collection of tools for constructing distributed application management software. Meta provides the mechanism, while the programmer specifies the policy for application management. The policy is manifested as a control program which is a soft real time reactive program. The underlying application is instrumented with a variety of built-in and user defined sensors and actuators. These define the interface between the control program and the application. The control program also has access to a database describing the structure of the application and the characteristics of its environment. Some of the more difficult problems for application management occur when pre-existing, nondistributed programs are integrated into a distributed application for which they may not have been intended. Meta allows management functions to be retrofitted to such programs with a minimum of effort