Unavailability of PATSTAT Online May 26th - June 8th 2015

[mkracker]

Due to a larger maintenance and re-installation effort, PATSTAT Online will not be available from May 26th - June 8th 2015. Among others, the database management system which is currently MySQL will be replaced by MS SQL Server. Because their SQL dialects differ slightly, you may have to adapt your existing queries. Slides 14 - 21 from the PATSTAT SQL self-study course (downloadable from (http://www.epo.org/searching/subscripti ... nline.html) might help you to do that.

Thereafter, the data of the 2015 Autumn Edition will be available as usual. Also, it will still be possible to register for a free 2-month trial on the EPO home page (http://www.epo.org/searching/subscripti ... nline.html).

I apologize for any inconvenience.

[nico.rasters]

Just curious. Why the switch from MySQL to MS SQL Server? What are the advantages of MS SQL Server, or what was the problem with MySQL?

[mkracker]

We switched to MS SQL Server for a couple of technical reasons:

• • It is in line with our IT strategy.

• • The data preparation process for PATSTAT raw data is also based on MS SQL Server.

• • PATSTAT Online is an application on top of the DBMS. In this architecture, the JDBC driver is of crucial importance. In this respect, the JDBC driver of MS SQL is more powerful, which saves a lot of ugly code we needed for various work arounds.

• • The query optimizer seems to be more efficient. PATSTAT Online has to serve all kind of queries and users with varying experience. We cannot optimize it for certain types of queries, so we let the query optimizer take care of this.

• • In our environment tests have shown that we may gain a 3-fold performance increase on average.

By no means I want to indicate that MySQL is not sufficient to run PATSTAT data. According to a survey we did last year, more than 1/3 of the users are using MySQL, about ¼ MS SQL Server, both followed by STATA, Oracle, PostgreSQL and several others.
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Martin Kracker / EPO PATSTAT

[liuxia0510]

it is June 9th already, still not available, some other problems? thanks

[mkracker]

Yes, there was a slight delay. Since noon yesterday, PATSTAT Online is up and running again.

Martin Kracker / EPO PATSTAT