This page will teach you how to use the emcDB program to write calibration data ASCII files into the PHENIX EMCAL Postgres databases, and to browse EMCAL databases content.

Disclaimer: the emcDB program is only a convenient tool to update/dump the EMCAL databases. It is not a bullet-proof program ! It can for sure be improved. If you have special requests, do not hesitate to contact me (aphecetc@in2p3.fr).

Important warning

Previous versions of this document had a warning here concerning the use of a private Objectivity federation to do some testing. Now that PHENIX has switched to Postgres, there is no such thing as a private Objy FD. We do not know for the moment if there will be a way to get test Postgres "Federation" or not. Thus, please be prudent with update mode of the emcDB program, as your changes will be made to the official PHENIX databases!

Please also note that in principle the emcDB program is still able to deal with Objy, using the "--dbms Objy" command line option.

Reminder

So far, we have 18 EMCAL calibration databases, corresponding to 9 calibration data "flavours" (there are 2 DBs per flavour : one tag-DB and one data-DB). The database names are of the form : calib.emc.XYZ.pdb, where X is the data flavour :

Y is Tag (for Tag-DB) or Cal (for data-DB), and Z is a sequence number (0000 for the moment).

In the following, databases are referred to by the flavour name (e.g. Gains).

Using the emcDB program

Getting help on the emcDB program

You can get the syntax by doing:

> emcDB --help

Browsing what is in a given flavour database

Use the following syntax :

emcDB --dump calib.emc.[flavourName]

where flavourName is one of Gains, Pedestals, Pedestals5 (for the RunII pedestals), QAs, LCTofs, WalkTofs, TofT0s. Note that flavours are case-sensitive.

The above command is an interactive one, i.e. for each bank header, you'll be asked if you want to dump also the content of this bank (type 0 to continue, -1 to abort program, or any number n in between to see n channels). This can be quite painful for databases with a lot of banks. To overcome this difficulty, you can either use the --batch option to not be prompted for any answer, and/or restrict the set of bank you'd like to inspect, using the --(inserted|start|end)(After|Before) and/or --bankID options, e.g.

emcDB --dump calib.emc.Gains --bankID 108 --insertedAfter "2001,12,20,12,36,45"

which will show you only Gains banks for FEM 108, inserted into database after 2001, December, the 20th, at 12 h 36 m 45 s.

Putting calibration ASCII files into the Postgres database(s)

The general syntax is :

emcDB --update directory

where directory is the path to the calibration data files. Please note that official ASCII calibration files are usually to be found somewhere under /afs/rhic/phenix/phnxemc.

The above command will read all calibration files to be found under directory and will put them into the relevant database. Special note on pedestals : depending on the number of pedestal-calibration files for one FEM (3 or 5), a different database will be filled (calib.emc.Pedestals or calib.emc.Pedestals5). It should be automatic.

31-Aug-2001 Due to a possible problem in PHTimeStamp::operator >> , please always use the --forceDate option (see below), as the timestamp specified in the ASCII files themselves is currently not properly read out.

22-Jan-2002 The above bug should be fixed. But still you might want to use the --forceDate option to bypass the date which is in the files (e.g. to insure that a set of banks has the same start-of-validity period).

The --update option will write things into the official PHENIX Postgres database, so please mind your steps!

Special note on ToF-related calibrations

The ToF directory usually contains 3 calibration flavours : the walk corrections, least-count, and t0-drift ones. If you'd like to update only one of them, here's the procedure to follow :

  1. Make a fresh somewhere/ToF directory
  2. Copy the relevant flavour you'd like to put in the DB, e.g. : 
    cp /yourplace/ToF/*WALK* somewhere/ToF
  3. Then use emcDB as usual : 
    emcDB --forceDate "year,month,day,hour,minute,second" 
      --update somewhere/ToF

Specifying the date : the --forceDate option

Usually, start-of-validity dates for the calibration data are fetch from the ASCII files themselves. If you want to override those, use the --forceDate option of the emcDB program. It takes a date string, in a format which is the one of the PHTimeStamp constructor :

> emcDB --forceDate "2001,08,01,12,45,00" 
  --update /afs/rhic/phenix/phnxemc/EMC/m_080701

Special note on PbGl gains for Run II

This is a little bit special case.

Many Gains files are split over many directories in e.g. /phenix/data24/vikonnik/Gains/RunXXXX, each of those directories being a normal top directory for calibration flavours, i.e. :

/phenix/data24/vikonnik/Gains/Run31250/Gains
                             /Run31250/QA
                             /Run33350/Gains
                             /Run33350/QA
...

The idea is to use each RunXXXX directory as a calibration set. For this, we need both start and end of validity period for each set (start=time stamp of first run of the set, end=time stamp of first run of the next set to avoid time-gaps).

So the first step is to get those time stamps. We do have a PHENIX Run Database, so we will use it for that purpose. We could have make it transparent, but a) some run used by PbGl are not in this database and hence the relationship runnumber<->time stamp can not be found using the Run DB and b) when we did use Objy as our database managment system (prior to Postgres), for testing purpose we'd like to be able to read PHENIX Run DB while writing Gains into a private Federation (and currently Objy is not able to open 2 Federations in one single process...). So we used an interim file, and this has not changed. This file is produced using the command :

cd some_dir
emcDB --runtimes 90000

This will select Postgre (Pg) as the DataBase Management System from which to fetch runtimes, for runnumber greater or equal to 90000, and will produce a emc_runtimes_initfromfile.tmp.txt file, like :

36503,Sun Dec 16 15:10:53 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:11:22 2001
36504,Sun Dec 16 15:11:43 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:12:13 2001
36505,Sun Dec 16 15:12:34 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:13:02 2001
36506,Sun Dec 16 15:13:25 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:13:52 2001
36507,Sun Dec 16 15:14:14 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:14:42 2001
36508,Sun Dec 16 15:15:03 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:15:32 2001
36509,Sun Dec 16 15:15:59 2001,Sun Dec 16 15:16:26 2001

Then, using information contained in Viktor's files for the run missing in PHENIX Run DB, we completed this file to obtain a new one (emc_runtimes_initfromfile.tmp.txt), covering all the runs we need.

We then use the --updatePbGlGains option to actually read the Gains files and put them into the Gains database

cd some_dir (same as before !)
emcDB --updatePbGlGains /phenix/data24/vikonnik/Gains

And that's it ! Please note that it might be a little long...

Comparing database content and ASCII files

If you'd like to know from where a given database bank is coming from (and assuming you still have the directory that was used when using --update), you may do :

> emcDB --dump calib.emc.Gains --bankID 0 
--insertedAfter "2002,1,1,0,0,0" 
--compare /afs/rhic/phenix/phnxemc/EMC/m_091001
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
emcDB 2.0 (10 June 2004)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dumping calib.emc.Gains calibration database 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BankID = 0
Insert   : Mon Jan 14 13:05:22 2002
StartVal : Mon Sep 10 10:30:26 2001
EndVal   : Mon Jan 18 22:14:07 2038
Calibration Description : 
User Name = Unknown
[# of channels] Show channels [n] Next bank  [q] Quit, [c] Compare to file(s) 
Please enter command >

If you then hit the C key, you'll see something like :

MATCHES the one in /afs/rhic/phenix/phnxemc/EMC/m_091001

Please note that you can use several --compare options to compare the current database bank against several directories.

Please note also that for pedestals, you need to use the --config gdb.dat option (which is used to find the FEM absolutePosition to PinNumber relationship). The gdb.dat file you can probably get from CVS online_configuration directory.