Items duplicated in an entity that causes data read failure.

Daniele Di Lorenzo

Hi community

I bump into a freakish problem today.

There were some ascii data readers that sometimes was not running (randomly)

All was fine on source files.

I made a lot of different tests, and in one on them the data reader was alternatively running/failure

No infos in log files.No error messages. Nothing.

Then, digging into data reader settings and entities involved, I discovered one entity with items duplicated.

Fortunately it was a service entity with no cubes and selections related to it, so It was easy to clear/reload it

After this action, all seems back to normality.

Note: the involved entity is fed only through data reader, and no manual changes have ever been done (infact changing manually a code from entity panel may lead to items duplication).
Attached you can find the entity extraction.

Have someone of you ever found a similar behaviour?

thanks!

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Helmut Heimann

Hi Daniele Di Lorenzo,

yes, I've had the same problem a short time ago. Unfortunately, in my case there were cubes involved and we had to reload...

Which BOARD version are you running on?

Regards,

Helmut

Daniele Di Lorenzo

Hi Helmut Heimann

I'm currently using 10.1.2.

I remember a similar behaviour some years ago, I had 9.0.3. but at that time I didn't identify the entity items duplication as a cause (if this is the cause).. the db was under develop and I directly cleared/reloaded it.

thanks

Helmut Heimann

Hi Daniele Di Lorenzo,

we were using 10.1.2 as well and according to support, this behaviour is directly linked to duplicate entity codes. We didn't find another explanation.

Regards,

Helmut

Previous Member

Hi Daniele Di Lorenzo

I have had this issue twice in the past with Board 8 and 10 and I can explain what happened in both instances. The symptoms I got were exactly the same as yours, duplicated entity values and datareaders that loaded data only every other time they were run.

In both cases the culprit was running BOARD using /multiinstance and the same user id in both sessions. In both cases multiple sessions had been opened and the same datareader, or datareaders that impacted the same BOARD objects, had been initiated in both sessions *at the same time*. I would imagine that this is not a good idea; because both sessions were running as the same user I expect that BOARD would not apply the normal locking processes that would be applied if two separate users ran the same datareader at the same time. On both occasions I was able to identify when the problem occurred by careful analysis of the log files which showed that the same process was running more than once at the same time. In my case the only option was to restore the latest backup prior to the point at which the problem was caused.

For this reason I am very careful about letting any users know about /multiinstance and am very careful about how I use it.

Helmut Heimann

Hi Robert Brooke,

Thanks for your very deep insight.

Kind Regards,

Helmut

Daniele Di Lorenzo

Thanks Robert Brooke.

This for sure could be a cause of duplicated entities.

I agree about the use of multinstance, it could be very useful but it has to to be used carefully.

Infact I don't set it for normal users.

Thanks again and have a nice day

Daniele