Instructions for Loading Conditions

There is a bit of bureaucracy that you need to go through if you want to load new or updated conditions. This is necessary because this is a critical operation which, if something goes wrong, could effect all levels of production (calibrations, reconstruction, skimming and analysis) and mistakes are not often immediately obvious. We therefore must be very careful about what gets loaded and will ask you lots of questions, so please be patient with us.

Here is a list of things to do with more explanation below:
  1. Get approval in IR2ProdMtg-hn. You should post describing what you want to do, why and what effect it will have. This gives sub-systems experts or others a chance to voice any concerns. You should wait for approval from the computing management before proceeding.

  2. Fill out the conditions loading request form. You need to fill out this web based form to provide the more technical details needed for the loading.
    http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~bukind/prform.html
    This form will automatically post your request to condmgmt-hn, and someone will contact you for clarification and to plan the time to do the loading. If you are not sure about how to answer some of the questions in the form, see the information items below.

  3. Load the conditions. At the appointed time you will need to coordinate through condmgmt-hn with the production team. Instructions for loading are here:
    /BFROOT/www/Public/Computing/Databases/experts/docLoadingIntoMaster.html

  4. Validate the effect of the new conditions. You are responsible to make sure that the new conditions you load have the desired effect. In the request form you should have explained what you need to validate things, and worked out a plan with the production team.


Bootfiles for the conditions federations:

Either the test-Master or the test CDB should be used for 15/16-series tests now.

Validity Period:

The validity period for new or updated constants is very important. Whan an application reads inforamation from the conditions DB it always reads the latest information (this will not be the case once the state-id is utilized, but it is the case now). We therefore need to make sure that anything loaded to the CDB only effects data that has not been processed already (or data that is planned to be reprocessed). Therefore production, skimming, and analysis will always see the same conditions when looking into the CDB.

We require, except under unusual circumstances, that you load conditions with a starting validity time >= to the start time of the next run to be processed (which can be obtained from the prodution team).

The validity period used for testing is not important. You only want to ensure that it covers the range of runs you want to test. It might need to be limited because it would effect other on going tests, but this should be sorted out in IR2prod-hn.

Last modified: Wed Mar 16 13:59:43 PST 2005