From Karoly.Lorentey@cern.ch Mon Nov  8 11:37:28 2004
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:23:03 +0100
From: "[utf-8] Károly LÅ^Qrentey" <Karoly.Lorentey@cern.ch>
To: D.P.Kelsey@rl.ac.uk, Maria.Dimou@cern.ch, Ian.Neilson@cern.ch,
     tlevshin@hppc.fnal.gov, Joni.Hahkala@cern.ch
Cc: Wim van Leersum <wim.van.leersum@cern.ch>
Subject: LCG user registration + CERN user database

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Hello Everyone,

Today Wim van Leersum (Cc-ed) has kindly given read access to me on the
data that we would like to use for registration in LCG.  I'd like to
share my first impressions after playing a bit with an Oracle client.

        - I have access to the following information:  (highlights only)

                - Internal database identifier (a 9-digit number)
                - Public identifier (a shorter number, also on the CERN badge)
                - First name, last name
          	- Email address
                - Phone numbers
                - CERN Building and office numbers
                - Home institute (name and address)
                - Nationality
                - Person class (like STAF, UPAS, etc.)

                - Experiment participation data.  For each known participation:
                	- Experiment/Subexperiment name 
                        - Participation start date
                        - Participation end date
                        - Whether this participation is the primary one
                        - Phone/Fax number (no idea what this means)

          (The birthdates are missing.)

	- There are no duplicate email addresses in the database.
          However, more than half of the people on record have no
          associated email address.  I guess people who want to use
          the Grid would probably want to belong to the other
          half. :-) (Experiments with random VO members indicate that
          our users do have their addresses set. I have found no
          members so far without an email address.)

        - An alarming number of people (61.3%, including for example
          Maria, Ian, and myself) seem to have absolutely no
          participation data.  Again, experiments with random VO
          members (non-dteam) indicate that the data is much better
          maintained for our userbase than for CERN in general.  I
          have found no physics VO members so far without a
          participation record.

        - Furthermore, of the 32482 participation records that do
          exist, only about 20 (0.06%) have their end date in the
          future.  48.8% of the participations have expired, and 51%
          (16578) have no end date set (i.e., they seem to be in
          status, but their end date is either not known or not filled
          in).  This pretty much validates my earlier suspicion that
          the end date is normally set only after the person has left
          an experiment.

In summary, it seems the database is indeed useful for our purposes.
Extrapolating from the handful of experiments I have done so far, both
email addresses and participation data seem to be carefully maintained
for people working on the actual physics experiments.  (We in LCG are
not so lucky.)  However, this needs to be better verified; these
impressions are distilled from a very small sample, and later findings
may invalidate them.

-- 
Károly

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