PDM SWUG

[bnemec]

For those interested in PDM stuff there's a PDM SWUG, started by Tom Cote and Marty Ohnemus, meeting today at 12:00 ET. They started having these discussions about a year ago after a very good Round Table discussion at SWW, there was significant interest in starting up a monthly meeting so that's what they've done.

https://www.meetup.com/PDM-SWUG-SolidWo ... 285138514/

[berg_lauritz]

Sadly I couldn't make it.

Anything super important we should know/that you found very helpful?

(I know you're doing the stuff we want tot do soon...)

[bnemec]

Sadly I couldn't make it.

Anything super important we should know/that you found very helpful?

(I know you're doing the stuff we want tot do soon...)

Tor presented on this one and covered ODBC as it pertains to PDM and troubleshooting data base connections. Lot of stuff covered at a fast pace, more than I could absorb for sure. One highlight in my notes is the "Connectivity Test Tool", look up SPR 069274.

Several of the leads in the group were going to present round table like sessions at SWW22 when it was going to be in person. Most of those sessions were scrubbed when SWW switched to online only. So people had put work into preparing these discussions but didn't get to use them, so they've been using the PDMSWUG meets for them.

[AlexB]

Sadly I couldn't make it.

Anything super important we should know/that you found very helpful?

(I know you're doing the stuff we want tot do soon...)

Yeah it was mostly around troubleshooting the database connection if that fails from the client side while the database is verified up and running. They went through a lot of stuff really quickly so I didn't get as much out of the session as I'd hoped. The connectivity test tool has helped us a lot in the past when setting up replicated servers at other sites. It essentially tells you if it's ready to go live. I haven't really used it on the client side but I imagine it would be helpful in configuring the server and database for the first time. The only down-side is that there isn't a lot of help regarding what to do if the communication fails at any of the steps it checks.

[bnemec]

Yeah it was mostly around troubleshooting the database connection if that fails from the client side while the database is verified up and running. They went through a lot of stuff really quickly so I didn't get as much out of the session as I'd hoped. The connectivity test tool has helped us a lot in the past when setting up replicated servers at other sites. It essentially tells you if it's ready to go live. I haven't really used it on the client side but I imagine it would be helpful in configuring the server and database for the first time. The only down-side is that there isn't a lot of help regarding what to do if the communication fails at any of the steps it checks.

I can agree with your comments. My guess is Tor was trying to help us find the right place to look as there wouldn't be time to chase down each of the potential rabbit holes from there. I kinda got that hint when he mentioned web searching once we get to a non-pdm message. Trying to Google the cryptic or overly general PDM specific error messages can lead to goose chasing. For example, just googling "solidworks pdm failed to connect to database" will return a lot of results with many different solutions, maybe one or two might happen to cover my problem but if I don't know what the problem is I won't know which one to try.

It seemed like the message was to show us where to look to find the right thing to google. Once we find the correct question the answer is usually obvious or straightforward to access. The hard part is figuring out the right question.

[jcapriotti]

It was good technical information for a very limited use case. Hopefully it was recorded and stored somewhere for future reference. At most, it may jog my memory if I run into those issues in the future, but I would need to revisit the video for the details.