The 3rd International Winter School in Grid Computing (IWSGC’10) will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students to learn about Grid Computing. There will be no OGSA-DAI component this year but if you would like to know about the different middlewares available to build up Grids then this is a good introduction.
International Winter School in Grid Computing
January 26th, 2010Turning your research ideas into reality
January 18th, 2010Collaboration increasingly lies at the heart of successful research. To help develop new collaborations, the Collaborations Workshop will bring together researchers, funding body representatives and technology experts in Edinburgh on 10-11 March 2010. This expertise, combined with the workshop’s novel structure, will create the perfect opportunity to meet researchers with complementary skills who, in collaboration, could help turn your ideas into a reality. Register for the workshop at http://oss.ly/r.
Sharing your OGSA-DAI codes
January 11th, 2010We have created a new SourceForge project called OGSA-DAI-HACKS, at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai-hacks/
The purpose of this project is to provide a low level threshold for people to share any code or work they have done using OGSA-DAI. By low threshold we mean that there are no agreements or anything else to sign. In essence all you will have to do is:
- Join the project (all you require for this is a SourceForge id).
- Create a directory in SVN with your SourceForge user id or project name or institution name in:
http://ogsa-dai-hacks.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogsa-dai-hacks/hacks/trunk/
and in this directory add:
- Your code, this could be activities, clients, data resources, or whatever cool thing you are doing with OGSA-DAI.
- A README file at the top level describing:
- what your component (or components) does (do)
- what it’s dependencies are, e.g. OGSA-DAI version
- your contact details
and that is it for now. Clearly, as this is going to be a shared resource it would be good if you did not modify someone else’s code without prior permission. Using this mechanism we can grow a community, see how others have done thing and if your component is really useful it could be added to the main OGSA-DAI distribution. The only one other thing that we ask is not to put any jars or bits of code that should not be distributed – remember that this is an open source project.
We hope that you will wish to join this project and contribute what you have been doing with OGSA-DAI so others may use it and learn from it.
OGSA-DAI 3.2.2 released
December 22nd, 2009December 22nd, 2009
We have released version 3.2.2 of our database access and integration software.
OGSA-DAI is an extensible framework for the access and management of distributed heterogeneous data resources - whether these be databases, files or other types of data – via web services. OGSA-DAI provides a workflow engine for the execution of workflows implementing data access, update, transformation, federation and delivery scenarios.
OGSA-DAI 3.2.2 is a bug fix release of OGSA-DAI 3.2.1. The bugs that have been fixed all relate to the distributed query processing (DQP) functionality. The DQP controller now destroys any request resouce it creates and various bugs relating to the use of functions have been fixed.
Please see the release notes for a list of all the bugs resolved and other changes.
OGSA-DAI is a free, open source, 100% Java product and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Downloads compatible with Apache Axis 1.4, Globus 4.0.8 and Globus 4.2.0, are available
To download OGSA-DAI 3.2.2 visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai/files/
OGSA-DAI 3.2.2’s user doc is at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/UserDocumentation/ogsadai3.2.2
and the release notes at:
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2.2/ogsadai3.2.2-axis/Release.html
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2.2/ogsadai3.2.2-gt/Release.html
To find out more about OGSA-DAI visit our project WWW site at
and our open source project site at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai
The OGSA-DAI project – which involves both EPCC and NeSC – is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK. For further information about OMII-UK visit
Regards, Ally
On behalf of the OGSA-DAI team.
Tags: OGSA-DAI 3.2.2, Release
OGSA-DAI 3.2.1 released
November 11th, 2009November 11th, 2009
We have released version 3.2.1 of our database access and integration software.
OGSA-DAI is an extensible framework for the access and management of distributed heterogeneous data resources - whether these be databases, files or other types of data – via web services. OGSA-DAI provides a workflow engine for the execution of workflows implementing data access, update, transformation, federation and delivery scenarios.
OGSA-DAI 3.2.1 is a bug fix release of OGSA-DAI 3.2. A bug that affected backwards compatibility with OGSA-DAI 3.2 for certain third-party activity developers has been resolved. A number of DQP limitations and bugs have been addressed, in particular DQP now supports multiple UNION operators in a single SQL statement.
Please see the release notes for a list of all the bugs resolved and other changes.
Please note this release is not to be confused with OGSA-DQP 3.2.1 released in 24/07/08. OGSA-DAI 3.2.1 contains a fully-updated and rewritten version of DQP.
OGSA-DAI is a free, open source, 100% Java product and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Downloads compatible with Apache Axis 1.4, Globus 4.0.8 and Globus 4.2.0, are available
To download OGSA-DAI 3.2.1 visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai/files/
OGSA-DAI 3.2.1’s user doc is at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/UserDocumentation/ogsadai3.2.1
and the release notes at:
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2.1/ogsadai3.2.1-axis/Release.html
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2.1/ogsadai3.2.1-gt/Release.html
To find out more about OGSA-DAI visit our project WWW site at
and our open source project site at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai
The OGSA-DAI project – which involves both EPCC and NeSC – is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK. For further information about OMII-UK visit
Cheers, mike
On behalf of the OGSA-DAI team.
New free eBook: The Fourth Paradigm
October 16th, 2009The UK e-Science programme always recognised the importance of data. The Fourth Paradigm recognises that data-intensive science is dramatically changing the way research is performed, and is an excellent compendium of progress with this new approach. It is also dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray, who christened data-intensive research “The New Paradigm”, who shaped the transactional model of databases we all depend on, who led Microsoft into supporting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and into developing new database technology to support data-intensive research. Sadly, Jim was mysteriously lost at sea in January 2007.
The book has several connections with UK e-Science since the prime mover and first editor is Tony Hey. OMII-UK PIs, Carole Goble and Dave De Roure, have both written chapters in the book and are attending the book launch at the Microsoft e-Science conference in Pittsburgh today.
The book will be available for free download from the website (at 9.00am East Coast time and 2.00pm UK time):
In addition, the New York times also had a highly relevant article this week:
Software Sustainability: Looking Past the Myths
October 12th, 2009Setting up OGSA-DAI 3.2 and playing with DQP
October 2nd, 2009I was keen to play with DQP so I decided to test it by pulling data from two databases. I have found the documentation descriptive enough but I will write the procedure I followed. Hopefully, it will be helpful to some.
I want to deploy OGSA-DAI Axis on Tomcat. I have a MySQL database on my machine and a Postgres database on another machine. My plan is to use DQP (which is bundled in OGSA-DAI 3.2) to do a join across these databases. I will deploy OGSA-DAI on my machine. I will then deploy two data resources, one for each database, and a DQP resource that includes these two resources. Finally, I will run some queries.
OGSA-DAI 3.2 released
October 1st, 2009The OGSA-DAI project, a partner in OMII-UK, have released version 3.2 of their database access and integration software.
OGSA-DAI is an extensible framework for the access and management of distributed heterogeneous data resources – whether these be databases, files or other types of data – via web services. OGSA-DAI provides a workflow engine for the execution of workflows implementing data access, update, transformation, federation and delivery scenarios.
The main features of OGSA-DAI 3.2 are as follows:
OGSA-DAI 3.2 now includes Distributed Query Processing (DQP).
- DQP allows the tables from multiple distributed relational databases to be queried, using SQL, as if there were multiple tables in a single database. These databases are exposed via OGSA-DAI servers.
- DQP was originally designed and developed by at the University of Manchester and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Previous versions of DQP were released as a separate product – OGSA-DQP.
- DQP has now been rewritten and is now simply an extension to OGSA-DAI. DQP’s functionality is now exposed as OGSA-DAI resources and activities and accessed via OGSA-DAI’s standard services. This greatly simplifies deployment and enables extensibility within a single framework.
Non-blocking data sinks that allow data pushed to OGSA-DAI from a client to be cached until it’s ready to be processed.
A new monitoring framework which tracks the data blocks produced and consumed by each activity in a workflow.
Support for relational database-specific meta-data extractors and mappers from JDBC column types to OGSA-DAI tuple types.
New security activities for passing client credentials through workflows and retrieving credentials from a Globus Delegation Service.
More efficient GridFTP activities.
A number of bugs have been fixed, components made more efficient or robust.
Unlike previous versions of OGSA-DAI, OGSA-DAI 3.2 only compiles under Java 1.5 and not Java 1.4. Apart from this, OGSA-DAI 3.2 is designed to be backwards compatible with OGSA-DAI 3.1 without the need for recompilation – data resource, activity and presentation layer APIs and service WSDLs remain the same.
OGSA-DAI is a free, open source, 100% Java product and is released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Downloads compatible with Apache Axis 1.4, Globus 4.0.8 and Globus 4.2.0, are available
To download OGSA-DAI 3.2 visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai/files/
OGSA-DAI 3.2’s user doc is at
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ogsa-dai/wiki/UserDocumentation/ogsadai3.2
and the release notes at:
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2/ogsadai3.2-axis/Release.html
http://ogsa-dai.sourceforge.net/documentation/ogsadai3.2/ogsadai3.2-gt/Release.html
To find out more about OGSA-DAI visit our project WWW site at
and our open source project site at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ogsa-dai
The OGSA-DAI project – which involves both EPCC and NeSC – is funded by EPSRC through OMII-UK. For further information about OMII-UK visit
Cheers, mike
On behalf of the OGSA-DAI team.