Select results to export via sqlite experimenter

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Beatriz Spaggiari asked Jun 1, '22 Beatriz Spaggiari commented Jun 3, '22

Select results to export via sqlite experimenter

I'm using experimenter to export simulation results in sqlite format, but the resulting file is quite heavy. I would like to know if there is a way to select which outputs to export via experimenter sqlite.

For example, exporting only data from statistics collector, instead of dashboards.

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.1.2

experimenter sqlite outputs

Answer 1 · 2022-06-01T13:35:45Z

Jason Lightfoot answered Jun 1, '22 Beatriz Spaggiari commented Jun 3, '22

This is not currently supported - you'd need to customize the experimenter (preferably using a module) to do it at the moment. @Jordan Johnson will have more insight on this.

If you'd like to see this as a standard feature then I'd suggest it in the ideas section (it's a good idea).

· 4

Jordan Johnson ♦♦ commented · Jun 01, 2022 at 02:31 PM

@Jason Lightfoot is correct, being able to pick and choose which charts or output tables you want isn't supported. There is a checkbox on the Experimenter called "Save charts and output tables for each replication". If you clear this box and confirm the dialog box that appears, the Experimenter will essentially skip all charts and output tables, essentially recording only Performance Measures. So right now, it's all or nothing.

I would like to understand your concern more. I understand that the results file can become large, and I understand that you are looking for ways to make it smaller. But I am interested to know why. Is something going slow when the file is large? Are you doing something with the files later (maybe emailing?) that makes a large file inconvenient? Any insight you can give would be appreciated.

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Beatriz Spaggiari Jordan Johnson ♦♦ commented · Jun 01, 2022 at 06:50 PM

Previously the results were exported via txt. Which allowed the choice of the desired output to be exported individually.

We've switched to the new version of experimenter 22 and we're having trouble sharing the results file. The sqlite file is getting quite heavy, even in small models, which makes it difficult to send it by email to the client, and it takes a long time to download the file from the cloud and import it into Power BI, for example.

We would like to export results only from statistics collector to make handling the sqlite file easier.

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Jordan Johnson ♦♦ Beatriz Spaggiari commented · Jun 02, 2022 at 08:03 PM

If you were using some method to export data to txt file before version 22, you should still be able to use a similar method in version 22. The change is that the data is stored in the database file, instead of in the tree. But all the same data is being recorded.

But maybe, since a sqlite file is a single file, it's better to try to share that file directly, instead of creating txt files yourself. One possibility is to delete the results you don't need. The attached model has a script that drops really big tables after running the experiment, and then uses VACUUM to shrink the file size. So first you run the experiment, then the script. The exact code may not work in future versions. But it should work for 22.0, 22.1, and (most likely) 22.2.

CleanExperiment.fsm

I will also add an issue to the dev list to possibly improve this.

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cleanexperiment.fsm (34.8 KiB)

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