Interesting Data Management Problem (Maybe anyway) 1

[Rhys666]

I'm currently specifying a small application to monitor and report flows thru' measuring devices which are child records of sites.

Basically, a physical site can have between one and ten measuring devices on it each of which measures flow in cubic meters per second and records this every 15 minutes. In a given day each measuring device will provide 96 flow readings, and there is a mathematical relatioship between the measuring devices on a site, allowing for derivation of site level flow readings,

i.e., for each of the 96 daily periods;
FlowMeter1Value + FlowMeter2Value - FlowMeter3Value = SiteLevelFlowValue

I have a requirement for the Business to administrate these mathematical relationships independantly of each other, so the relationship between devices on a site is unique. Also, these relationships will need to be utilised by a daily process taking in new readings, (all of which come in at a measuring device level), and deriving up the period reading values to site level reading values from those stored at the measuring device level. So for each period of each day being calculated up, this mathematical relationship need to be applied.

At the client end it's fairly easy to produce a web page to allow management of this as I'm working in .Net and can comfortably utilise dynamic controls or web user controls to present a selection of meters belonging to a given site and mathematical operators, then allow the user to create an onscreen mathematical relationship. My concern is in trying to store and utilise these relationships in DTS and Stored Procedures.

Because each site may have a different set of relationships I'm concerned and a little blank, (excepting possibly tring to maintain a dynamic Sql String to be pulled in and used in a sProc or DTS), about the best way of maintaining these calculations.

Does anyone have any thoughts, or have they done anything similar and what approach seemed the most practical? I'm not looking for an instant solution, but am concerned about introducing methodology that becomes rapidly unmaintainable or creates a horrible bottleneck in overnight processes making them take too long to run to be practicable.

Rhys

""Vampireware /n/, a project, capable of sucking the lifeblood out of anyone unfortunate enough to be assigned to it, which never actually sees the light of day, but nonetheless refuses to die."

My Home

 

[vongrunt]

Lemme recap (and plz correct me if I'm wrong):

- many physical sites
- many measuring devices for one site
- many results for each device (every 15 minutes = 96 results/day)
- one level flow reading per site, given by math relationship (formula?) between site devices

How complex are these math relationships in general? If everything is about + and - then parametrization of relationships is simple. Just assign +/- flag indicator to every device and site level readings can be easily calculated in a set-based fashion.

 

[Rhys666]

Seems to be right...

The math (as I understand it thusfar) is fairly basic as you suggest, although I have an ongoing concern regarding bracketing of the relationship as the business want to allow multiplication and division math operators also, but have no requirement for bracketing to control the calculation.

With basic math I think your concept's sound, cheers!

I'll just flag back up my issue of bracketing to control the equation and see if this gets shot down...

Rhys

""Vampireware /n/, a project, capable of sucking the lifeblood out of anyone unfortunate enough to be assigned to it, which never actually sees the light of day, but nonetheless refuses to die."

My Home