Hello Tim,
There are two possible approaches to tackle the situation you have described below.
Before I get into the two scenarios, let me ask you a few additional questions.
- Will all the engineers you work with use DIAdem to do data mining?
- Do all the engineers annotate the data with test criteria?
Saving all the data to a central location is actually not hard at all. You may chose to put different users' data into different sub-directories, or put all the data into the same directory.
Let's assume the "T" drive is your network drive for test data. Let's also assume the "T" drive has a directory called "testdata" where all data will be stored. As song as the file names & extensions that are supplied by all the engineers are unique, you could store all of your test data in the same directory "T:\testdata" and just index that directory.
You could also create subdirectories for all users, something like this:
T:\testdata\User1
T:\testdata\User2
T:\testdata\User3
...
When you index the "T:\testdata" directory, the DataFinder will automatically (unless you chose not to) index all the sub-directories as well.
If you have multiple DIAdem users, each one will have their own index on their local computer, each one indexing the same data on different machines.
As an alternative, there is the DataFinder Server Edition (DFSE - http://www.ni.com/datafinder/).
- The DFSE is a separate piece of software that is installed on a server class machine within the network. Multiple DIAdem users can connect to the same index on that server at the same time.
- The DFSE uses a more powerful database engine for enhanced indexing and query response performance
- The DFSE is capable of utilizing multiple processors on the server machine for faster indexing
- The DFSE will index data even when the clients are disconnected from the network (laptops used in the field for instance) and will always have the latest files indexed when clients connect to the server
Advantages of the DFSE also include:
- Reduced network traffic (instead of multiple clients indexing the same data on the network on multiple machines, multiple copies of DIAdem can access the DFSE at the same time, sharing the same index)
- Guarantee that the search results on all PCs are identical due to a shared index (if local indexes are used on each machine, they might index different drives and directories within the network depending on the individual configuration of the DIAdem licenses on each PC)
- File access right management through windows file rights, allowing to restrict access to certain types of data to specific users.
Bottom line, you can certainly very easily put all your data in a central location an index it with either a local copy of DIAdem or with the DFSE.
Feel free to contact me directly to arrange for a live online demonstration of this at: (800) 531-5066
Please ask to be connected to me and I'll be happy to show how this works in detail.
Of course, you can also ask additional questions here in this thread, and we can share the answer with other forum participants who might be interested in learning more about this technology.
Best regards,
Otmar
Otmar D. Foehner
