NorthernSands

We're all Trusted, except my 'other' account.

@vikpaw : I'd forgotten about TrustedAuto, so ta very much!

I've usually come across this error message on Windows 7 when UAC is still on. During installation SIMS is unable to update the SIMS.ini file after it's initial creation. Therefore it contains some info, but not everything it needs and then SIMS fails to run correctly. @CyBeRkId2002 & @fiza ; could you post a copy of the SIMS.ini from a machine that's not working?

Is this error when trying to install SIMS? If so, how are you installing? My advice would be to install from the latest install ISO from Capita, then the latest update ISO (if you aren't already). Regarding what you need installed on the server before you start; very little. Install the OS, run Windows Update (you may need to do this more than once; updates to updates), install SQL, run Windows Update (again, try it more than once). Install SIMS (which will install .NET etc). HTH

To add to this, I have experience with trusted logins. When we migrated to a new Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2, I installed SIMS from scratch on the new server, which was already attached to the domain, and used DBAttach to bring in the SIMS MDF / LDF (not the master DB, or any other) that I'd correctly unattached from the old server. I used the raw DB files rather than a backup 'cause I wanted to change the name of the DB from SIMS2008 to SIMS. I did not receive an error message on attachment regarding the trusted logins and they all worked fine. I have, on other occasions, pulled a live backup from the server and restored it to my workstation for testing. Despite being on the same Domain, I did receive the error message regarding trusted logins that @vikpaw is referring to. I can't tell you if this is because it's a workstation and not a server, or because of the method used to bring the DB over, but in both instances the account used to login into Windows was the same and has local administrator access only, not domain admin access (in case that's relevant).

Certainly though I don't know all the ins-and-outs as it was a colleague who dealt with it. A school backed up using this method (not BackUp Exec, but to tape). The server died taking the live data with it. On restoration, the DB had not only dropped logins, but also lost some recent data, with some data corruption. The previous backups were the same (a rolling weeks worth). Everything else from the tapes recovered fine. File recovery on the HDD gave us the live DB, but with similar problems. I do not know the exact nature of some of these problems, the DB was known good prior to the server dying. Anyway, Capita became involved, charged a hefty fee, and left the school with a DB that was mostly OK (well, a lot better than before). Need less to say a thorough survey was done of all the backup methods used by the school we were involved with and the scripts to stop / start the service were removed and new scripts based on DBAttach were used instead. Recovery testing was also conducted to ensure that worked. It did. Some online backup solutions will call DBAttach themselves to ensure the DB is backed up correctly. Smart move!

@CAM; sounds about right for the official T/A returns, but I honestly thought (unless it's changed) that actual results went in the 'KS2 Validated Results' Result Set. I think the CTF download I mentioned puts them in the right place.

@SkywOrca; I just type it out manually, but I might be doing it wrong 'cause it doesn't always work! ^^^^^^^ Did it work?! EDIT: Yes!!!

Like @vikpaw, I've not dealt with UK official stuff in a while. I too vaguely remember the early days of RAISE, when it was rubbish! We didn't use it. Regarding KS2 results, there is / was a website that you could log in to, paste in a bunch of UPNs and then get given a CTF file to download that contained all the KS2 results. The site was quite basic, but it worked a treat. Unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember what it was called as I've not used it in 4 or 5 years. Let me Google... ...I think it's this site: Key to Success.

If anyone were to go down the SIMS route, then I know that the SMIS support team down there offer a pretty comprehensive service.

I would agree, test both scenarios. I would still argue that when a CPU core is being hammered, HT is a bad thing (a bit simplistic but that's the idea). SIMS using SQL is an example of this. However, Arthur is correct in saying that modern Hypervisors utilise HT far more effectively than before. You can set certain vhosts to not allow more than one thread to run on a single physical core (effectively disabling HT on that core). (Source then look at the sub-topic). My opinion is still that a core running SIMS SQL should not be shared.

I've run into situations where a restoration following this method of backup has left the SIMS DB corrupt meaning a hefty Capita bill to sort it out (if they can). Just stopping the SQL service and copying the MDF LDF doesn't always work. The DB will need detaching correctly (using DBAttach) or use the DBAttach script to backup on the fly. Seriously: I can confirm that this is not a safe backup method!

@JustinRoberts: Have a look at my post at the end of this page http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/69947-sims-server-hardware-large-school-2.html and the one on the following page in the same thread. The first post might help determine if the CPU is being used by the SIMS SQL process or something else. The second post gives a description of Hyper-Threading and why I think you should turn it off. If you have the Turbo functionality enabled, I've seen recommendations to turn that off as well for a SQL server. Pete

@vikpaw: Regarding Hyper-Threading; yes, it does make it appear as though there's another core to hand out, but it's not real and will quite often take away CPU resources from another process. For those that aren't sure what it is, it was designed to help the old P4 from being so slow. A pipeline in a CPU is made up of all the stages a chunk of program goes through when it gets processed and it takes one CPU clock cycle to get something from one end of the pipeline to the other. Generally speaking the longer a pipeline is the faster the CPU can go, but it makes the CPU clock cycle longer (but the cycles are going quicker 'cause in theory the CPU is fast enough to overcome this). A shorter pipeline will limit the CPU speed earlier, but will process things quicker per clock cycle. Clear as mud?! This is one reason why the earliest P4s were slower than the latest P3s (which had a shorter pipeline). The speed of these early P4s wasn't sufficient to overcome the penalty of the longer pipeline / cycle. The P4 had a very long pipeline because Intel wanted it to get to silly speeds (4GHz was the initial promise), but they soon discovered that not everything that was getting sent down the pipeline was using each stage, so quite a lot of the pipeline was going unused during the clock cycle. This led them to invent Hyper-Threading (HT). It 'fooled' the OS to think there were two CPU cores in the system and the OS would allocate two chunks of program at the same time. The HT system in the CPU would then slot one chunk in along side the other so that more of the pipeline was being used per clock cycle, but this quite often slowed down both processes. In a desktop scenario HT worked quite well; we were more interested in being able to do more at once and didn't notice the latency impact that HT was having. In a server environment, latency is quite important. So in the P4 days, in a server environment, it was more often quicker to run a single core CPU without HT than with. AMD have always had shorter pipelines and never needed HT. This is why the Athlon64 was so much quicker than the P4 even though they ran at slower clock speeds (less GHz). This led to the shameful period of Intel's marketing dep't to try and fool us into thinking more GHz was always better. Yeah right! Today's CPUs all have shorter and more efficient pipelines than the old P4. In simplistic terms, because the pipeline is shorter, there's much less impact if some of the pipeline goes unused (the P3 and AMD way of thinking, if you like) and the latency impact of trying to cram two chunks down one pipeline is relatively higher. That and we also have 2 or more real cores to play with, not fake ones. This Microsoft article SQL Server support in a hyper-threaded environment discusses HT in a SQL server environment. The bit that is interesting to me is: If you look at the SIMS CPU usage as described in my previous post, you'll see that a single person using SIMS can max out one CPU core, rather than have the load spread over several cores, ergo, in my opinion, the last sentence of the quote comes into effect. Discuss! EDIT: * a logical processor is an HT CPU core. EDIT2: What I didn't mention above is that when you have HT enabled, not only is there contention in the pipeline, but also in the L1, L2 and L3 caches and there may be the possibility that one thread (chunk of work) will throw out the other thread's L1-3 data for it's own, which will in turn get thrown out by the other thread, meaning lots of return trips to main RAM (which is much slower than the caches).

As with most things, the more power you can give something, the better. SIMS is a prime candidate for this. That goes for CPU speed and width (number of cores), RAM speed and amount, Storage speed and network capacity. Below you'll find out how to monitor the key areas and my opinion on what this means: One of the good things about Server 2008 is the Resource Monitor (available from the Performance tab of Task Manager). Fire this up and in the CPU section of the Overview tab tick sqlservr.exe and DocumentServerService (and any other SIMS related process, such as Discover). This will filter the Disk, Network and Memory sections. This is a great way of quickly monitoring SIMS usage on the server without delving into Performance Monitor. What you'll notice is that any single user connection from a workstation won't use more than one CPU thread on the server. This tells you two things; 1) to service any given user request, you need a fast CPU so it can process this request as soon as possible (it doesn't spread it over several cores to speed it up), and 2) you need a large number of cores to service a large number of users and any given period of time. This last one, though, is not as important as it may sound. If the cores are quick enough, then it can turn around a lot of user requests before an additional core will noticeably speed things up. To find out when you need more cores (if you're already hitting 100% usage a lot) you'll need to dive into Performance Monitor and check out the CPU queue depth. Above 4 (I think this is the magic number) and you'll need another core. Further more, looking at the Disk section tells you something very important; the storage subsystem is used A LOT! Being able to fit the DB in RAM is great for read operations, but write operations need a quick storage subsystem. A decent SAN is always a good place to go, but any fast storage is good. The network section will give you an idea if you're bandwidth usage and, nicely, which workstations are using how much. The first surprising thing I noticed here is exactly how much DocStorage is used. The critical thing about the Memory section is the number of Hard Faults / sec. A Hard Fault is when the server's RAM does not contain the piece of data stored in memory that it needs. Read Page File / Swap File here. In other words, SIMS wants something it's put in memory, but the OS has run out of RAM and put that piece of data on the HDD in the Swap File (which, no matter how fast the storage, is a lot slower than RAM). Zero Hard Faults / sec is your target. This section also tells you what percentage of RAM is used and how much is used by each of the SIMS processes ticked in the CPU section. It's more useful, however, to switch to the Memory tab and keep an eye on Free and Standby memory. Free will always be low because any half decent modern OS will use as much RAM as possible to cache as much as it can (recent programs etc.). That cache is the Standby amount. When the server runs out of Free, it then has to make compromises with what it caches. It'll slow some things down and eventually cause SIMS to hard fault. The bottom line IMHO: CPU: A fast dual core would be better than a significantly slower quad core. Always the most modern variant (P4 based CPUs, though high in GHz, are rubbish for SQL loads. But no-one will be using these any more. Right?). Oh, and don't bother with Hyper-Threading, always have that switched off. RAM: Amount will be more important than speed if budget is an issue simply because you never want to run out! Storage: Fast and secure. Network: As long as you're not running some half-duplex 10Mb rubbish you're good to go! Hope this helps! Pete.

Yeah, it can look pretty good. The colours are taken straight from the cell colour in the marksheet, so you can either colour the cells / columns manually or colour them based on the contents (which I guess is what you're referring to). Doing the latter is straight forward, if time consuming. You essentially have to use a Nested If Then Else formula column which refers to the column you want to colour, with each 'If' testing the criteria for each colour, and the 'Then' returning the original column and the colour. You have to do this for every column you want coloured, so a marksheet to do a year group might run to well over 100 columns (half the original columns, half formula columns). Once done though, it's done (and @vikpaw has an amazing VB script so you can change result sets in bulk so you can just clone the first template). A screenshot might help: You have to be careful when using colours, as Red is the exact same shade as unsaved Cell text (so you can't see the data). In my case I don't care 'cause the the data is going to be saved (to save the colour to the result) and the result will turn black and be visible again, but there are some circumstances when you do want to read unsaved data. The colours I used are (the same as used by default in Office 2007 for some conditional formatting): Colour R G B Blue 0 112 192 Green 0 176 80 Amber 255 192 0 Red 255 0 0 Pete EDIT: Oh after you've created your first If Then Else formula column, when creating the next one, choose ITE formula type then choose to clone it from the first ITE column. This'll save you having to re-enter the colours.

@ctaylor: Have a look at the attached. I've re-worked out how I did what I did all those years ago. It essentially uses vlookup(), row() and indirect() with if() and iferror() thrown in for good measure. The trick is get vlookup() on the row after a match to start it's array below said match in the raw data. So, when it's found a match, the next row starts looking for it's next match after the first match in the raw data. Clear as mud?! It has one major limitation that might mean a switch to lookup() rather than vlookup(). The latter will only lookup data at the left of an array, whereas lookup() can be set to lookup a match anywhere. In English, for vlookup() to work you'd have to have your columns for the different focus types to the left of the rest of the data (they have to be the left most column of the vlookup() array). Actually, I don't think that made it any clearer! Anyway, have a look at the attached... ctaylor1.xlsx

There is another way to bring through rows that only match certain criteria, but I can't remember the way I did it. It essentially took one worksheet of the whole school (or just a year group) then brought through only one reg group to a specific worksheet. Rinse and repeat on additional worksheets for the other reg groups. It used formulae, rather than VB, and it worked. I could paste in a new list of students and, if there'd been reg group changes, the individual worksheets would alter their lists dynamically, which would in turn change graphs that were based on the sheets. In the OPs case, each sheet could, instead of being different reg groups, be other criteria (<85%, 5+ A* - C etc). Each sheet would also have it's own header, and only bring through the columns it would need. Job done? Now if I could only remember how I did it... I'm sure I could work it out again.

I like those graphs, @vikpaw. Very clear and very informative. Maybe I should take another look at them next year. I presume 5 years worth of computer enhancements will make running them take less than three weeks...

Fortunately the SMT in my current school aren't there yet. They've barely moved beyond Collect Data > Report to Parents > Pat selves on back! I'm dragging them forward, though, kicking and screaming. In my previous school I produced different things for different people. I'd produce year based headline figures then work with the Dep Head in charge of Assessment on providing written analysis commentary to go with the data (ie no individual student data). For HOYs and HODs I'd produce student lists with all relevant data and some headline figures for their specific cohorts / subject areas only. Teachers would have a set of pertinent marksheets available to them with a range of data available. It all came from Assessment Manager (version 5 and 6 back then), with very little work done in Excel. It just worked. If the HOYs / HODs wanted to see which students had <86% attendance, well, they had the % attendance column and the option to use the filter function in excel. Same for 5 A* - C, FSM, KS2 Levels etc... In my experience, the further up the ladder someone is when they request data, the less they know what they want. I give them what I think they want and work from there. I'm usually right. A lot of people want data for the sake of having data. But they don't think about the poor sap (thee'n'me) who has to spend loads of time preparing it for them. And if we make the mistake of doing a good job, they just want more. I've historically made the mistake of being too helpful. Never again! That doesn't really help the OP, though! but an anonymised copy of the spreadsheet would be very useful. Pete

We'll be hosting two SIMS DBs using this structure: \SIMS2008BS\SIMS \SIMS2008IS\SIMS Top one being for the British Stream, bottom the Indian Stream. Simples!

Hi Charlotte, Am I correct in thinking the criteria in the first paragraph (5 A* - C, <85% att etc) are the 20 focus groups? And I presume you want these groups to be dynamic (ie, if a student suddenly drops below 85% attendance you want them included in that group)? Mmm, have you looked at Discover yet? I've not had much time to fully digest it, but it does have ability to create dynamic user defined groups. These UDGs should then be able to be used in AM7 marksheets which, using formula columns, can produce a fair amount of headline data (such as 5 A* - C). What I'm suggesting (assuming Discover works as I think) will take a huge amount of time to set up, but once done, it would simply be a case of export > print (well, ish!). Can anyone else see where I'm going with this? Or is it just me? Again. Failing that, use fancy Excel formulae and multiple worksheets to do the work for you. Unless you run out of nested ifs. Or is that just me as well? Seeing the Excel doc would help (with names changed etc). Pete.

@emmaburt; you're welcome. Let us know if you need any help with the creation of the templates. A word to the wise though: Word is still utterly pants at dealing with tables. You'll notice there's a very narrow (shallow? thin?) row at the top of each table, with columns that may not match the rest of the table. If I need to add extra columns or something, this top row is something I always refer back to, and quite often spit cells further down to match the top row when making amendments, then merge the cells back again, always leaving the top row as is. Er, clear as mud?! @vikpaw; I think the description works better than grade considering most of our parents are EAL / haven't a clue what a [sub-]Level is. Although the Middle School like it like that, the Upper School insist on the grade! Grrr! The colouring works well, but we actually switch it off for printing at the moment, and back on again when uploading to the DMS.

Our is now called SIMS. Similar to @vikpaw, ours was called SIMS2008, and the instance called SIMS. The name doesn't really matter as long as it's referenced correctly in the .ini files. @AyatollahPies is correct, I've come across many FMS DBs with names that describe their use.

Hi Emma, I re-did ours when I arrived at this school in September. They were using the old 'landscape with a table' style. I'm not saying mine is any good. Given time I'm sure it could be better (well, given time or a new senior team!), but it might get your creative juices flowing, as it were, along with any others you see. I've also included the template so you can see how it's constructed and what's missing for this particular student. Pay attention to the and tags as what's between them won't appear if there's no data (eg EAL and AEN in this case). Hope this helps! Pete. MockRpt1.docx MockRptTemplate.docx