perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Srivatsan Rajagopalan <>]

Thanks Andy for the information on BWCTL. It helped me get started but when I entered SHOW TABLES; it did not return any listing as you had suggested.

However, I did sudo su to view the contents under var/lib/mysql/bwctl. It showed three entry types (namely .frm, .MYI, .MYD) for 201108_NODES, 201108_DATA and 201108_TESTSPEC. But I face this error upon SHOW TABLES;

mysql> SHOW TABLES;

ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1

I am only beginning to get my hands dirty with perfsonar, so any level of guidance is most appreciated. 

Thanks,

Srivatsan

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 8:00 AM, Andrew Lake <> wrote:

Hi Srivatsan,

Aaron is out of the office for a few days but i can help you look at the tables. First of all, I would not recommend trying to look at the raw database files. MySQL is not really designed for this type of use of the database. Its much easier to use the mysql program and look at the tables that way. When you SSH into the machine you can run the following command to connect to the database:

mysql -u root bwctl

Once you connect you's see a "mysql>" prompt where you can enter SQL commands. I'd recommend trying to find a SQL reference online if you are not familiar with it. Here's the basic set of command you'll probably need to run:

You can enter "SHOW TABLES;" to get a list of the tables in the database. You should see three tables for each month of data. For example, if you only have data for this month:

mysql> SHOW TABLES;

+-----------------+

| Tables_in_bwctl |

+-----------------+

| 201108_DATA     | 

| 201108_NODES    | 

| 201108_TESTSPEC | 

| DATES           | 

+-----------------+

4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The tables ending with TESTSPEC contains the parameters of the test, the NODES table contains information about the endpoints, and the DATA table contains the individual measurements. If you run "SELECT * FROM table_name;" where you replace the table_name with the table you want to look at then you'll be able to see the data (e.g.  SELECT * FROM 201108_DATA;). At the top of the result it will label the columns which help interpret what each value means. As aaron said, most of them are reasonably straight forward, so without going through every column, I'll let you take a look.

Hopefully that helps you get started.

Thanks,

Andy

On Aug 16, 2011, at 2:00 AM, Srivatsan Rajagopalan wrote:

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your response. I connected to the perfsonar box through WinSCP and Putty terminal to find where the BWCTL measurements were stored as a file. Specifically, I looked into ~/var/lib/mysql/bwctl for the measurements file. 

I am not sure if am looking in the right place, but I haven't been able to find the measurement tables with values (my job is to perform statistical analysis of the data for BWCTL tests between peers). 

You had mentioned reasonably easy to interpret the various tables.  Do you have an idea as to where I could find these tables?

What file-type extension should I search for to get access to these?

Thanks,

Srivatsan

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Aaron Brown <> wrote:

Hi Srivatsan,

On Jul 9, 2011, at 2:47 PM, Srivatsan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am a graduate student at Texas A&M University. As part of our project, we are using perfsonar boxes to run tests between peers. We would like to know where the database of measurements (say for BWCTL tests) is stored and how to access it. Specifically, I would like to know which folders to access and what name it would be stored under.

The bwctl and owamp data is stored in MySQL databases (bwctl and owamp respectively). I'm not sure if there's a document with the database schema for the bwctl database, but it's reasonably easy to interpret the various tables. The owamp data is a bit more opaque, but there is a document describing it at http://anonsvn.internet2.edu/svn/perfSONAR-PS/trunk/perfSONAR_PS-perfSONARBUOY/doc/owamp_database_schema.txt .

Cheers,
Aaron

> Your assistance is appreciated and would help me with my work. I look forward to your response.
>
> Thanks,
> Srivatsan Rajagopalan

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