04-10-08
--------

Summary
- Bug fix
- Remote DRMS setup 
- Working prototype of a perl interface to SUMS API
- BZERO and BSCALE 

Bug fix
-------
Removed order by clause for series without prime keys.

Remote DRMS setup
-----------------

Helped Deborah Haber of U Colorado and Paul Rajaguru of IIA to set up
their remote DRMS. Definitely a big time sink. Some of the trivial
problems I have to deal with:

1. icc v10 does not compile because of SIG_BLOCK problem
2. gcc complained about static definition in sums:datestring()
3. -lz problem: cannot find -lz
   installed zlib, but not zlib-devel

4. database configuration

This is by far the biggest problem. Our software will not run from a
straight rpm installation of PostgreSQL. The minimum change to
postgresql.conf is to open listenaddress to '*', and then use
pg_hba.conf for host based access control. 

A few things to consider for future improvement related to DB:
- perhaps we can allow localhost connection in addition to host
  connection
- deal with missing hostname problem. Our second DB connection (for
  session information) currently relies on hostname, it really does
  not need to be. I have seen problem with .pgpass working with ip
  address only.
- create a fix named temporary namespace using masterlists. And use
  this namespace in drms_series.sql and drms_session.sql.

Working prototype of a perl interface to SUMS API
-------------------------------------------------

Yes! I got it working! We have just about the hardest type mapping
there, e.g.,  char **, dynamically allocated array.

I have a perl wrapper for SUMS API functions of the following:

SUM_t *SUMOpen(char *server, char *db); 
int SUMClose(SUM_t *sum);
int SUMGet(SUM_t *sum);
int SUMPut(SUM_t *sum);
int SUMAlloc(SUM_t *sum);
int SUM_poll(SUM_t *sum);
int SUM_wait(SUM_t *sum);

I managed to crash sum_svc while testing SUM_put().

Given up on wrapping printf. I have seen examples of how to do it. Too
complex. Instead, I created wrapper functions like
SUMOpen(char *server, char *db) {
  SUM_open(server, db, printf);
}

A few things to improve on:
- use uint64_t instead of unsigned long long.
- put swig command into makefile and select location for perl module.
- test on gcc. currently using icc
- move wrapper functions out of sum_open.c and into the interface spec.

BZERO and BSCALE 
----------------

Had good discussion with Art on BZERO and BSCALE. Art wrote down
detailed notes. We think we understand the problem and have a solution.