A complete history of everything

Kyle Lanclos; William T. S. Deich

doi:10.1117/12.926454

24 September 2012 A complete history of everything

Kyle Lanclos, William T. S. Deich

Proceedings Volume 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II; 84510Y (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.926454
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

This paper discusses Lick Observatory's local solution for retaining a complete history of everything. Leveraging our existing deployment of a publish/subscribe communications model that is used to broadcast the state of all systems at Lick Observatory, a monitoring daemon runs on a dedicated server that subscribes to and records all published messages. Our success with this system is a testament to the power of simple, straightforward approaches to complex problems. The solution itself is written in Python, and the initial version required about a week of development time; the data are stored in PostgreSQL database tables using a distinctly simple schema. Over time, we addressed scaling issues as the data set grew, which involved reworking the PostgreSQL database schema on the back-end. We also duplicate the data in flat files to enable recovery or migration of the data from one server to another. This paper will cover both the initial design as well as the solutions to the subsequent deployment issues, the trade-offs that motivated those choices, and the integration of this history database with existing client applications.

Citation Download Citation

Kyle Lanclos and William T. S. Deich "A complete history of everything", Proc. SPIE 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II, 84510Y (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.926454

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