Athena Developer Guide

Athena Chapter 12 N-tuple and Event Collection facilities Version/Issue: 2.0.0
• MS Access: Write as a Microsoft Access database 1 .
• OPT=’’
There is also weak support for the following database types 1 :
• SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle ODBC
These database technologies are supported through their ODBC interface.
They were tested privately on local installations. However all these types
need special setup to grant access to the database.
Except for the HBOOK data format, you need to specify the use of the technology
specific persistency package (i.e. GaudiRootDb) in your CMT requirements file
and to load explicitly in the job options the DLLs containing the generic (GaudiDb)
and technology specific (GaudiRootDb) implementations of the database access
drivers:
ApplicationMgr.DLLs += { "GaudiDb", "GaudiRootDb" };
• NEW, CREATE, WRITE: Create a new data file. Not all implementations allow to
over-write existing files.
• OLD, READ: Access an existing file for read purposes
• UPDATE: Open an existing file and add records. It is not possible to update already
existing records.
• SVC=’’ (optional)
Connect this file directly to an existing conversion service. This option however needs special
care. It should only be used to replace default services.
• AUTHENTICATION=’’ (optional)
For protected datafiles (e.g. Microsoft Access) it can happen that the file is password
protected. In this case the authentication string allows to connect to these databases. The
connection string in this case is the string that must be passed to ODBC, for example:
AUTH=’SERVER=server_host;UID=user_name;PWD=my_password;’
• All other options are passed without any interpretation directly to the conversion service
responsible to handle the specified output file.
For all options at most three leading characters are significant: DATAFILE=, DATABASE=
or simply DATA= would lead to the same result.
The handling of row wise n-tuples does not differ. However, only individual items (class
NTuple::Item) can be filled, no arrays and no matrices. Since the persistent representation of row
1. The implementation for MS Access and other ODBC compliant databases is available in the LHCb extensions to Gaudi.
It is not distributed with Athena
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