There are two primary modes of QC1 data ingestion:

• ingest historical data in bulk mode, and
• ingest new data.

Technically there is no difference between these modes. The logical difference is that historical data generally need some 'massage' before ingestion, while new data will have the proper format by default.

A new line of entries is ingested into the database using the tool

qc1Ingest

This tool uses the table description files to assign a parameter name and a value to each key. The syntax is:

qc1Ingest -table <tablename> -keyname1 <key value1> -keyname2 <key value2> etc.

The keys can be given in any order, but must be specified. Omitted keys receive the specified default entries.

Example:

qc1Ingest -table uves_bias -cdbfile UV_MBIA_020218A_BLUE_1x1.fits -median_master 143.223 etc.

It's as simple as that, but be careful with using the tool interactively since typically there will be 10, 20 or more parameters to be passed. The typical use of qc1Ingest will always be an automatic call within scripts.

There might be, in addition to the new QC1 data from the actual data flow, a bunch of historical QC1 information which has been accumulated over the past years. These need to be rearranged, reformatted or even reconstructed before qc1ingestion.

Filenames. Primarily because of the requirement to provide filenames whereever possible, an attempt should be made to reconstruct or retrieve filenames for historical QC1 data. If this is not possible, they can still be ingested with NULL entries as file names.

MJD-OBS. For some reason, that parameter may have been stored with limited precision (e.g. F8.3). It should be stored in the QC1 database with the best possible precision, which is the one in the FITS header.