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Saturday, September 06, 2008 \| Login


NEO Bids Accelerator As the NEM becomes more complex due to changes in ownership structures and market design, the volume of bid data being submitted to, and processed and published by NEMMCO has increased markedly. For the standard NEO user, this huge increase in data and data-housing requirements translates into “slow bid reports”. In response to an increasing number of helpdesk calls regarding “slow bid reports”, IES has developed the NEO Bids Accelerator (NBA). NBA is a software application that removes redundancies from infoserver data tables, and in the process improves the speed at which your infoserver operates. It means that when a NEO query calls for data, your infoserver, if using the NBA, is able to respond up to A daily corporation bid stack run on an NBA compressed database is graphed in 2 seconds compared to 6 minutes running time on an uncompressed database. An outline of the technical specifications for the NBA can be found in the following section. IES is offering its existing NEO clients a free trial of NBA. For demonstration or to find out more, please contact IES. Information to keep IT departments smiling Specification The NBA is a program based on the use of batch processes. The NBA reads bid data from NEM INFOSERVER bids tables, removes extraneous data and writes the new "compressed" data to new tables. All the required bid information is retained in the “accelerated” data but the removal of redundancies (duplicated data, same bids etc) results in the new tables being 5% of the original size. By writing the "compressed" data to a new table, the integrity of the client's NEM INFOSERVER is not compromised. The NBA is a program which would typically be installed on a spare computer or server. It runs once per day and reads bids from Infoserver tables and writes them into two new compressed bids tables (CBT). IES provides a script to automate the creation of the CBTs as a part of the NBA licence. Standardised bid reports using the compressed bid tables will be provided with the software. Details Processes the BIDPEROFFER table to produce a BIDPEROFFER_A which can be used to see all rebids (i.e. bids made during pre-dispatch). Process BIDPEROFFER_D to produce BIDPEROFFER_F: the tables containing final 5min bid data Typically these two extra tables can be stored on INFOSERVER or a separate server. Uses NEO2 and NEO3’s in-built bid decompression facility. Can run interactively if required, however typical configuration is as an automated daily batch to process last trading days bid data. Typical results With a low end database server containing two years of data, the results are as follows: Running a region bid stack for one week: NEM data 67,418 records fetched in 19 secs NBA data 3,486 records fetched in 4 secs Running a plant bid stack for a week: NEM data 2,593 records fetched in 8 secs NBA data 186 records fetched in 1 sec Note that the above results were obtained on a dual core 64bit 3.2GHz Xeon server with 6GB RAM. Demonstrations Please contact IES to arrange a trial installation of the NBA. We will provide: Fully functioning software which you can install; and Support with the installation. The NBA will begin producing accelerated bids data which you can then report on using accelerated bid reports which come standard with NEO3. The software will be valid for one month.