View Index is always being rebuilt - lotus-notes

As of late, I have encountered a problem with my view index being rebuilt all the time and users are having massive issues with this particular view.
I figured it was due to #Date in my selection formula aswell as one of my column formulas. This way the selection formula would be different every second that passes.
So I figured, since I dont need hours/minutes/seconds in my formulas, I would use #Today. This worked out well for 2-3 days and after that the same problem occured again.
So since the problem is back again, I'm not quite sure if that even causes the problem. When this particular view is open, I have issues in every tab that's open in notes, not only this specific database.
Is this a common/known issue? What can I do to avoid this problem?

Yes, it's a common issue that has been well known since the very early days of Notes more than 20 years ago.
#Date is not a problem on its own. #Now and #Today are both problems.
Using #TextToTime("Today") was a popular workaround that was discovered early on. This hid the problem from the indexer so the server failed to realize that the view was out of date. It doesn't solve the underlying problem, though, which is that the view is trying to do something that views simply aren't designed to do. Views are intended to be static, requiring update only when documents change. Introducing time into a selection or column formula makes them dynamic, which kills that presumption and is a major source of performance problems. Using this workaround requires that the view be fully rebuilt every night. You can do that by setting the view index options to "Manual", and setting up a program document to run an updall command with the -T option for the specific database and view once per night. Note that if your users are spread out across timezones, you'll have to pick one specific time as your standard, and if you have servers spread out across timezones you're going to have a lot of fun figuring out how to make them all show the same documents in the view at all times - but that's common to pretty much all approaches to the problem.
See this IBM Technote for a description of several other options that people have used over the years, with their pros and cons. Also see this article by Andre Guirard, which covers date/time issues in great detail.
I would add that the agent-and-folder solution that they describe in the Technote was generally my preferred approach, but it does have an additional disadvantage that they don't mention: it can eventually lead to an obscure situation where the server throws an error "Folder is larger than supported". This error actually has nothing to do with the size of the folder in documents; it refers to fragmentation of internal structures that occurs as large numbers of documents are moved in and out of the folder over time. It could only be fixed by deleting and re-creating the folder, which you can do in your agent code. I believe this problem may be fixed in more recent versions of Domino, but it caused me a lot of grief back in the Notes 6 and 7 timeframes.

Related

When creating an issue through gitlab api set a specific issue number

We are trying to migrate our old issue "tracking" system to GitLab.
For legacy reasons the issues have relatively large numbers 800 and above and they are not consecutive.
However for backreference it would be great if we could have one number for each issue and not an "old" and a "new" number, as in some contexts issues are referred to by number (e.g. external parties who in the future also will use GitLab)
I found this Set Minimum Issue Number in Gitlab where issues were created to "fill" the gaps. However this creates a lot of clutter (especially E-Mails Gitlab API - Create issue quietly?).
Any ideas how to solve this?
The ideal flow would be:
use gitlab-api to create issues we have and
add a parameter so set the number of the issue.
When using gitlab, the numbers are filled up by new issues over time,
or they count up from the highest issue number currently in the
project.
If I could actually set the issue number afterwards in the database (as was hinted in the linked question above), how will gitlab handle this? (I don't even know where to start looking in the gitlab code base, any hints on that might also answer this question).
Thanks in advance for any advice on how to tackle this.
I found a trick to do that.
There is exporting to .csv from the GitLab and .csv is an editable format. It can be edited in any excel-like program, or even in a notepad.
Make a first issue, fill it with dummy data (I suggest filling as that's a way to spot which field is responsible for what).
Then fill your data by any way suitable, preferably mass-exported from the previous issue tracker and import back to the GitLab.
If done correctly, this should be possible to be done partly automatically.

No depot VRP - roadside assistance

I am researching a problem that is pretty unique.
Imagine a roadside assistance company that wants to dynamically route its vehicles. Hence for each packet of new incidents wants to create routes that will satisfy them, according to some constraints (time constraints, road accessibility, vehicle - incident matching).
The company has an heterogeneous fleet of vehicle (motorbikes for easy cases, up to tow trucks for the hard cases) and each incident states it's uniqueness (we know if it wants just fuel, or needs towing).
There is no depot, only the vehicles roaming on the streets.
The objective is to dynamically create routes on the way, having in mind the minimization of time and the total traveled distance.
Have you ever met such a problem? Do you have any idea in which VRP variant it belongs?
I have seen two previous questions but unfortunately they don't fit with my problem.
The respected optaplanner - VRP but with no depot and Does optaplanner out of box support VRP with multiple trips and no depot, which are both open VRPs.
Unfortunately I don't have code right now, as I am still modelling the way I will approach this problem.
I am really sorry for creating a suggestion question and not a real one.
Thank you so much in advance.
It's a rich dynamic/realtime vehicle routing problem. You won't find an exact name for your problem, as when VRPs get too complex they don't fit inside any of the standard categories.
It's clearly a dynamic/realtime problem (the terms are used interchangeably) as you would typically only find out about roadside breakdowns at short notice.
Sometimes you're servicing a broken down car, which would be a single stop (so a vehicle routing problem). Sometimes you're towing a car, which would be a pick-up delivery problem. So you have a mix of both together.
You would want to get to the broken down vehicles ASAP and some would need fixing sooner than others (think a car broken down in a dangerous position on a motorway). You would therefore need soft time windows so you can penalise lateness instead of the standard hard time windows supported in most VRP formulations.
Also for you to be able to scale to larger problems, you need an incremental optimiser that can restart from the previous (possibly now infeasible) solution when new jobs are added, vehicle positions are changed etc. This isn't supported out of the box in the open source solvers I know of.
We developed a commercial engine which does the above. We started off using the jsprit library, which supports mixing single stop and pickup delivery problems together. We later had to replace jsprit due to the amount of code we had to override to get it running happily for realtime problems, however jsprit may still prove a useful starting point for you. We discuss some of the early technical obstacles we had to overcome in getting jsprit to handle realtime problems in this white paper.

Localized Xpages application multiplying properties files

Yet another weird story from Domino Designer 9.0.1:
The application in question is set to support German and English; German is set to be both the source and the default langauge.
Over the course of the past few weeks we observed that there are some CustomControls and Xpages whose properties files are multiplying; within something like 12 hours we often see hundreds of multiplied files (currently we have 120 multiplications; earlier this week we had a case with > 1000 multiplied propertiey files!) In package explorer they turn up like this:
As you can see there is something like a docUnid added to the property's file name. Apart from a different time stamp they all are identical internally. In same cases both language versions are multiplied, in this particular case here only the German (= source) version shows that phenomenon.
Another strange fact: this particular custom control hasn't changed for quite a while, and it only contains a single control with a static text attribute, alongside a
Anyone having an idea what could be causing this, and what possible solutions I could try?
Tech facts and some more observations:
Domino Designer 9.0.1 FP6, ExtLib 17; we are working in a team where each one of us is coding in their own local replica, then replicating into the "hub" replica. I can't prove it but I assume that there is a connection between one of us replicating updates and the creation of new prüperty duplicates
EDIT: some more observations: I think I was able to pin it down to the replication between two specific machines; I just ran a sequence of 5 or 6 manually driven replications between both instances, every time without making any changes to the design code on either side. nevertheless every replication reported exactly 1 update and 1 addition, and each time a new property file was added.
So meanwhile I deleted the custom control in question and rebuilt it from scratch under a slightly different name (just to be on the safe side). For now it seems that the application is "behaving" now but I'm sort of sure that this will return sooner or later.
Speak after me: source control and replication do not match.
More details:
The property files get stored as attachments in a design note. That's usually the note with the form. Unless you switch on multi lingual, then each property gets its own note. When different people work on the database these note elements get recreated on build getting the next UNID kind of.
So the right flow for what you try to do: pick your best version of the nsf. Nuke the other replicas. Bind it to version control. Let your peer developer create an nsf from that repository. Sync of design shall only happen via that repository.
While your on it: add Bavarian as language, so your Munich customers can use the app too

Is It Possible To Reference TFS Work Item Fields More Than Once Within The Same Work Item?

We are currently in the process of upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2012. When TFS 2008 was set up, the people involved didn't understand a lot of what the work item fields were for, and we ended up with very heavily customised templates and in fact lost a lot of default fields. As part of the upgrade to 2012 we are trying to return to the out of the box templates as much as possible to ensure we get to use as many of the features as possible, however there are a small number of custom fields that we need to include for reporting purposes.
Our product development process involves a roadmap for upcoming releases which includes new work as well as bug fixes. When a bug is assigned to be worked on by the developers we would like to be able to choose which release we're targeting the fix for - as far as I can see, Iteration is best suited for this. At the point the bug is closed though, we would also like to track what release it was actually fixed in, since things often get bumped from one release to the next if higher priority bugs or change requests come in, but this is where we come unstuck since I can't seem to assign Iteration to both fields such that the two show different values.
If possible we would prefer not to have global lists that have to be constantly updated with release numbers across our product range (we have around 8 different products which are constantly in development, each with their own release numbers), and leaving one of them as a text field leaves open the possibility that we will get inconsistencies in what people enter, eg 1.01 versus 1.1 which will show up in reporting as 2 different releases. As the fields are just looking up a set of values in the background, is there no way that the iteration list can be used twice? Or does someone have an alternative suggestion as to how we get round this?
What I think I'd suggest in this case is using a COPY rule on a state change event, so that when you move your work item into the Closed state, it would populate your custom field with the value currently in your Iteration field.
This would give you a snapshot of the value at the right point in time which then wouldn't be altered if the iteration was later changed, along with a history entry if it was opened & closed multiple times over its lifetime.
As iteration is time limited and release is perpetual there is an inherent mismatch of purpose with using iteration here. Iteration is for planning.
You would be better creating a release list with the version that you release.
If you are sprinting for example you may not know up front which release you will end up on before you start. If you are not sprinting then you are just kidding yourself that your know.

Oracle Sort Order - What may cause it to change

Disclaimer: I know that it is bad to not use an 'ORDER BY' in SQL when sorted data is required.
I am currently supporting a Pro*C program which is having a wierd-problem.
One of the possible causes of the wierd-problem may be that the original developers (from a long time ago) have not used ORDER BY in their SQL even though the program logic depends on it!
The program has been working fine all these years and started showing problems only recently.
We are trying to pin the wierd-problem to the ORDER BY mistake (there are other cause candidates like a recent port from Solaris to Linux which took place).
What shadowy things on the database end should we look at that may have changed the old sort order? Things like data files etc?
Anybody have any experience with Pro*C on Solaris magically sorting the result-set?
Thanks!
Since you know that the program cares about the order in which results are returned and you know that the query that is submitted is missing an ORDER BY clause, is there a reason that you don't just fix the problem rather than looking to try to figure out whether the actual order of results may have changed? If you fix the known ORDER BY problem and the "weird problem" you have disappears, that would provide some pretty good evidence that the "weird problem" is, in fact, caused by the missing ORDER BY.
Unfortunately, there are lots of things that might have caused the order of results to change many of which may be impossible to track down. The most obvious cause would be a change in the execution plan. That, in turn, may have been caused either because statistics changed or because statistics didn't change enough or because of a patch or because of an initialization parameter change or because of a client configuration change among other things. If you are licensed to use the AWR (Automatic Workload Repository), you might be able to find evidence that the plan has changed by looking to see if there are multiple PLAN_HASH_VALUE values for the SQL_ID in DBA_HIST_SQLSTAT over different days. If there are, you'd still have to try to figure out whether the different plans actually caused the results to be returned in a different order. Beyond a query plan change, though, there are dozens of other possible causes. The physical order of data on disk may have changed because someone reorganized the table or because someone moved data files around on the disk or because the SAN automatically rebalanced something by moving data around. Some data may have been cached (or may not have been cached) in general in the past that is now cached. An Oracle patch may have been applied.
I suggest that change your physical table with view and make your required order in that view.
example
TABLE_NOT_SORTED --> rename to --> PHYS_TABLE_NOT_SORTED
CREATE VIEW TABLE_NOT_SORTED
AS
SELECT * FROM PHYS_TABLE_NOT_SORTED
ORDER BY DESIRED_COLUMNS
For response to comment:
According to this question and Ask Tom's Answer, it seems that since Oracle does not guarantee a default sorting if you do not use "ORDER BY", they are free to change it. They are absolutely right of course. If you need sorting, use Order By.
Other than that we can not say anything about your code or default ordering.

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