New Histogramming service for Atlas Tag database

There is a new histogramming service for Atlas Tag database. It is now completely independent service hosted on the CERN J2EE server. It can be called from ELSSI or from Web. The service talks directly to the Oracle database. It supports all databases from tnsnames.ora file (as a byproduct, a script which translates tnsnames.ora into context.xml usable in JSP services has been written). Currently, the service just show the 1-D histograms, other functionality (2-dim histograms, fits, ...) could be easily added if needed because there is a complete analyses package running behind the service.

The accumulated testing examples are available from http://cern.ch/SQLTuple/HistogramTest.html. The service API is:

http://cern.ch/SQLTuple/Histogram.jsp
?database=<database name as declared in tnsnames.ora>
&select=<SQL select clause as "column_name as histogram_name">
&from=<comma separated table names as "schema1.table1,schema2.table2>
&where=<SQL where clause>
&limit=<maximum number of rows to analyse, "0" indicates no limit, the default is "1000">

The time for creation of one histogram from one table is roughly linear with the number of events (which could be controlled by limit parameter):

t = 3s + 1s * (nevents / 100000) + 1s * (nevents / 25000)

This number should be multiplied if more histograms are requested and more tables are queried.


PHP/JavaScript solutions have been abandoned for two reasons:

1. All PHP/JavaScript do very nice drawing. But they don't understand what is a histogram. That means, that we would have to implement all functionality about binning, selecting limits, text legends,...


2. There is a serious memory limit on the PHP server so that we could only accumulate histograms up to about 1000 entries there. (There is no limit on the new service).