NWIS and Ingres Release To: "DC - All District Chiefs", "SA - All System Administrators", "CD - All Data Chiefs" cc: "Lewis Wade, ACH/Water Information, Reston, VA" , "Dorothy M Woods, Secretary (AO), Reston, VA" , "John C Briggs, Supv. Hydrologist, Reston, VA" Subject: NWIS and Ingres Release from: "Lewis Wade, ACH/Water Information, Reston, VA" Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 21:06:28 -0500 Sender: "Dorothy M Woods, Secretary (AO), Reston, VA" In Reply Refer To: Mail Stop 440 MEMORANDUM February 13, 1998 To: District Chiefs System Administrators Data Chiefs From: Lewis V. Wade (signed) Acting Assistant Chief Hydrologist for Information Subject: NWIS and Ingress Release The NWIS and DIS Offices announce the availability of: * Open Ingres 1.2 * NWIS Release 2_1 Tapes for both releases will be shipped to all Districts within the next two weeks. Open Ingres must be installed first. The installed versions of NWIS_1_3 and AIS 4.1 will run with both the new and previous release of Ingres, but the new version of NWIS 2_1 will only run with Open Ingres. This time of year, many Districts are reluctant to install new software until they have completed their annual report. However, the combined features and enhancements of both releases will give the Districts that install now a strategic advantage in completing their reports on schedule. Those advantages are described below. To ensure that DIS and NWIS support personnel will be available to answer questions and help with any installation problems, please send email with your installation schedule to: Open Ingres -- ingres_help NWIS 2_1 -- install@mailnwis.er.usgs.gov Estimating Installation Times The Open Ingres upgrade takes about 8-10 hours depending on the size and number of data bases. Most of this time is in backups, checkpoints, and unloading the database. The upgrade to NWIS 2_1 should take from 5-8 hours depending on the size of your NWIS data base. A background process which modifies the way null values are stored in the ADAPS measurement file take about 1 hour for 14,000 measurement records. To estimate your upgrade time, calculate the time based on the number of measurements in your measurement file and add about 2 hours. NWIS 2_1 Features There are more than 100 minor fixes, most dating from the earlier Prime versions. Major changes or additions for this release include: * Peak Flow File--The peak flow file is now part of the NWIS software. With the shut down of the WATSTORE Peak Flow File, Districts need to load NWIS 2_1 to have this software available. * Performance improvement for web data delivery--Changes were made to the nwis_www and SENTRY programs which in conjunction with the rt_www rev 2.0 software will greatly reduce processing time to deliver unit values data to the web sites. SENTRY triggers nwis_www to perform targeted unit-value retrievals from ADAPS. Because the whole system (both NWIS and webserver) now only processes stations when they have new data, total processing load is decreased while more frequent updates are achieved. In Montana where the process has been running in production, processing load has decreased even though the software is running 12 times an hour rather than only once an hour as before. * Corrected Publication Tables for Water Quality--With the 1997 annual data report, all water quality tables published in the annual data report that contain data from the National Water Quality Laboratory must be printed using "user defined" rounding rather than default rounding. The 2_1 release will correctly position the decimal point and line up the values in the table which the previous version did not. Districts will have significantly less editing to do for the publication tables. In addition, the table program will allow printing of values to 4 decimal places, a format that the laboratory now uses. * Ratplot and Hydrograph--The dense grid option with the use of large format inkjet printers produces a plot that can be used for the primary rating curve and eliminates the need for preprinted forms. These programs has been improved from the pre-release version announced and installed by some Districts in October 1997. * GWSI--The Statistics program (STATMES) has been added to process data from the Ground Water Check (GWCHECK) software. STATMES will generate statistical counts of database errors identified by the GWCHECK program. The results indicate the magnitude of errors found in the database, while GWCHECK indicates where the errors are located. See the NWIS home page for more details on what has been changed. http://wwwnwis.er.usgs.gov Open Ingres 1.2 Open Ingres is a major upgrade to the Ingres relational database software. It has been the production version of Ingres at 4 locations, National Water Quality Laboratory, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Arizona for sufficient time to know that it is working well. The general release of Open Ingres to the Division was delayed while upgrade procedures were tested and modifications made by Computer Associates (CA) to the utility that upgrades existing data bases. With these changes in place, Districts should have full confidence that the upgrade to Open Ingres can be made with a minimum of down time and with complete data integrity. Major enhancements and features of Open Ingres 1.2 are: * An intermittent problem with the Ingres database management server (dbms) crashing has been corrected. * The transaction logging system has been improved. This change makes the backup/recovery system more robust and accounts for some improvement in performance. Dual logging is now also provided. * The locking system has been improved and has reduced the problems with MUTEX errors which have caused the AIS system to hang. * Configuration by forms (cbf) has been provided as a single tool for configuring an Ingres installation. The default settings provided by WRD have been tested in consultation with CA-Ingres. * CA-Ingres is no longer providing patches to Ingres 6.4/4. Upgrading to Open Ingres should provide better support when a problem does occur. * New Forms-based Ingres/Net utility (netutil) which replaces netu. * Allows greater flexibility in handling the year 2000 problem. Dates have always been stored using the full 4 digits. Formats have been changed for easy update of existing applications which display only two digits. * New data types for large objects and spatial data.