Manual actions

The following sections provide information on the manual actions that you can use to manage your databases.

To perform an action manually, do one of the following:

• Right-click Databases and select the action from the menu, or
• Right-click the specific database and select the action you want to perform from the pop-up menu.

When you right-click Databases and select an action, a dialog specific to that action opens. The databases listed in the dialog are those to which the action applies.

When you right-click a specific database, only the actions that apply to that database appear in the menu and the database is selected by default in the dialog for the action.

Archive

The Archive action creates an archive of the selected database.

Before proceeding, ensure that you have write access to the archive directory location.

1. Right-click Databases or ION_Data and select Archive to open the Database Archive dialog. If necessary, select the database that you want to archive.

2. Select the directory where the archive will be saved.

   For standalone environments:

   1. In Save archive to, click the browse button to select the directory where the archive will be saved.

      ...\Power Monitoring Expert\Database\Archives\Data is the default directory for the saved archive, but you can specify another local directory.

   2. (Optional) Specify a different local directory.

      NOTE: You can only save an archive to a directory on the local machine, not to a location on the network.

   3. (Optional) Edit the default archive filename to follow your naming conventions.

      NOTE: The database name is restricted to characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _ (underscore).

   For distributed environments:

   1. In Save archive to, enter an existing directory path on the server and a valid filename for the archive.

      For example: C:\Archives\ION_Data_January.mdf. The path – in the example C:\Archives – must exist on the Database Server.

      NOTE: The database name is restricted to characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _ (underscore).

3. Select the data types that you want to archive.
4. Specify the date range of the data that you want to archive. For Start, select The beginning of the database or select Date and enter a date and time. Enter a date and time for End Date.

5. Under Trim after archive select whether or not you want to remove archived data from the database.

   You need to select The beginning of the database for the start date range for trimming the live database, otherwise the Trim after archive option is disabled.

6. Click OK.

The Progress field displays the current progress of the archive process. If a manual archive does not succeed, a message appears and the Database Archive dialog remains open with the OK button grayed out — examine the Progress field to discover where the process did not succeed. If the archive is successful, the dialog closes automatically.

Export Registry Setting

The Export Registry Setting action exports settings to a registry (.reg) file. This is useful if you need to set up client computers in a system where the primary server’s database settings (server instance name and database name) are customized. After you export the settings to the registry (.reg) file, you can import that registry file on the client computer.

1. Right-click Databases and select Export Registry Setting to open the Database Registry Key Export dialog.

2. Type the path and filename for the file or click the browse button to specify the location for the saved the database registry key.

   The directory ...\Power Monitoring Expert\config\cfg\ is the default save location for the exported database registry key.

3. Click OK.

New ION_Data Database

The New ION_Data Database action creates a new, blank version of the ION_Data database.

1. Right-click Databases and select New ION_Data Database to open the New Historical Database dialog.

2. Type a name for your new database.

   NOTE: Do not name it “ION_Data” as this is the default name for the existing ION database. Database names are restricted to characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _ (underscore).

3. Click the browse button to specify a location for the database.
4. Click OK.

Trim

The Trim action removes data from a database.

 

1. Right-click Databases, ION_Data or ION_SystemLog and select Trim to open the Trim Database dialog.
2. Select the database you want to trim from the Database to trim list.
3. Under Trim Range, specify the date range of data you want to trim (for the ION_Data database) or set the maximum data age in days (for the ION_SystemLog database).
4. For the ION_Data database, select the data types you want to trim (Data Records, Waveforms, Events) in the Data Types section. You can select any combination of data types to trim.
5. Click OK. A message appears to notify you that the selected data will be removed. Click Yes to continue or No to cancel.

Upgrade Database

The Upgrade Databases action upgrades the selected database to the latest database schema.

1. Right-click Databases and select Upgrade Databases to open the ION Database Upgrade dialog.

   The Power Monitoring Expert installer automatically upgrades your databases with the new database schemas when you install Power Monitoring Expert on an existing server. If you install the latest version of the product on a different server so that you can manually copy older database files to the new computer, you can run this action on the older databases (that is, on the ION_Data, ION_SystemLog, and ION_Network databases, and archives) to upgrade them with the new schema.

2. Select the database in the list that you want to upgrade and click OK.