Published Libraries

Overview

Published libraries provide the capability to centrally manage and publish a library definition to enable viewing or querying of the data from the Altair SLC Hub Excel Add-in and the portal interface.

The Altair SLC Hub web portal allows users with appropriate administrative access to manage published libraries centrally within the Altair SLC Hub.

Published libraries offer the advantage that the user does not need a locally-running Altair SLC or install and configuring drivers locally to access data in databases. Administrators can configure this on the Altair SLC Hub workers and users can access the data through Altair SLC Hub.

Managing Published Libraries

The Manage Published Libraries page can be used to create and edit published libraries.

Creating New Published Libraries

Authentication domains are not supported

Library definitions making use of authentication domains are not supported for publishing due to technical limitations.

Click the New button to create a new published library.

In the Publish library dialog, select the library definition you want to publish. Each library definition can only be published once.

The dialog can be used to set the execution profile, which controls the environment the published library runs in. For example, the environment could be a specific worker that contains the data or the correct drivers to access a database.

The Number of workers controls how many processes run to serve requests to the library and Session encoding can be used to specify the expected encoding of the data.

Editing Published Libraries

Click the more options button and select Edit to view the current properties of the published library, and optionally modify those properties. Changes to this might interrupt current request being made by users.

Published Libraries Status

Click the more options button and select Info to view the status of published library and the worker process.

Info Tab

Th Info tab shows an overview of the published library. This includes configuration details and how many total workers and failed workers it has.

Workers Tab

The Workers tab shows a list of the individual workers and their status. Each worker can be expanded which may will reveal what the current worker is doing or display any errors that have occurred with starting the workers.

Task Tab

The Task tab shows a list of the current tasks being performed by the published library. From here an administrator can see how long tasks have been running and cancel any that are taking too long or consuming too many resources.

Browsing Published Libraries

Portal

The published libraries can be viewed from the Browse Published Libraries page. Clicking one of the listed libraries to displays the members of the library. Select a member to see more details about the dataset; an Info tab containing the metadata of the dataset; a Data tab that displays the data and can be used to perform select, filter and sort operations.

Excel Add-in

Data in published libraries can also be accessed through the Altair SLC Hub Excel Add-in which allows fetching the data into spreadsheets and creating pivot tables. More information about the Add-in can be found in the community article: Using the Microsoft Excel plugin for the Altair SLC Hub

Troubleshooting

If a published library has failed to start any workers successfully it will not be able to serve any requests. This can be caused by various reasons including incorrect library definition, drivers not configured correctly on the worker and ports not being open to reach a database.

Some steps to run through if a published library is failing to start:

1. Verify that the library definition is correct. This can be checked by creating a libname binding for the library and after logging into Altair SLC Hub from Altair Analytics Workbench checking that the library can be accessed.
2. Check for startup failures in the published libraries worker tab. This should give useful information regarding why the library server has failed.
3. Check the Hub Administration > Cluster Workloads page. Find a workload with the name Library server for library '<library definition>' in namespace '<namespace>', select the currently running job, select the Main task and check the output logs for errors.