New Tracking Software: Poker Maven

[VisualCSharp]

I have a question for the community. The iPoker network appears to consist of numerous poker rooms. I am assuming that each of these poker rooms use the same hand history format. Would that be a correct assumption?

[Toasta]

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how about postgres support?

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As a previous poster stated, there is no reason for me to support PostgreSQL at this time. Poker Maven requires Windows, and a lot of the features in SQL Server 2005 make it the most worthwhile database engine choice in my opinion, including its integration with C# and .NET. I also use stored procedures for all my SQL queries and these stored procedures take full advantage of all SQL Server 2005 features, such as Common Table Expressions (CTE). After you install Poker Maven, install SQL Server Management Studio Express and open one of the statistics databases. Take a look at some of the more complicated Report_ stored procedures.

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maybe you should think again about supporting postgres, nearly all players use postgres with pt or pokermanager and i dont want 2 db engines running at the same time at my server or client.

[Phil153]

I like the look the look and layout of the screenshots a lot, but I can't get the program to open. I get this message when opening the self extracting zip:



I'm pretty sure I have the latest Windows Installer package. Any ideas?

Also, what kind of hand import speeds are you getting?

[Everlong]

I get the same error as Phil153 only after SQL install finishes successfully but pokermaven installer crashes

edit: I unpacked the installer by using the right-click context menu in winrar and it seems to be installing now

[VisualCSharp]

I think it may be a problem with the self-extracting EXE. I tested this on my QA VM and it went ok but there may be some weird issue in where it extracts the two files inside the EXE.

Try downloading the ZIP, extracting both setup files to your desktop, then running setup.exe.

There are two setup files because setup.exe does all the prerequisite checks (Windows Installer 3.1, .NET Framework 2.0, SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2). Once the prerequisites are found it will run the MSI which installs the product.

I may get rid of the self-extracting EXE and just add some instructions on my download page to run setup.exe, or I might be able to add some code in the MSI to prevent it from being run directly.

Thanks for the problem report guys.

EDIT: I've removed the self-extracting executable for now and updated the download instructions on my web site. Thank you.

[Everlong]

OK I have it installed, it starts up, I allowed it in my F-scure firewall - the process is running when I check but nothing happens.

[VisualCSharp]

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Also, what kind of hand import speeds are you getting?

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I have a pretty powerful developer workstation and with Full Tilt Poker I can get anywhere between 50 and 60 h/s. Many things can affect this measurement however. Here are a few:

- Hard drive fragmentation.
- Current size of both the statistics database and the hand history database. SQL Server obviously needs to continuously expand the size of the database to make room for new data, database transactions, etc. This causes a lot of hard disk I/O that will slow import speeds.
- Processor type, RAM, hard disk speed, etc.

The reason it's not instantaneous is there are lots and lots of individual records that must be written to the database for every hand. The hand itself, every player, every player for a particular hand, all hand action, sessions, etc. The database engine itself is the bottleneck, and mostly this is because of hardware I/O and transactions.

Poker Maven creates a single transaction for every hand imported. The reason it uses a transaction per hand is so that if you are importing 10,000 hands and the process gets interrupted at hand 9,999 it will only re-import hand 9,999 and not all 10,000. If it were a single transaction per import job then all 10,000 hands would have to be re-imported. Transactions are expensive and cause disk I/O because the database engine is effectively writing to a secondary "transaction database" before committing the changes to the real database.

Integrity of data is a primary concern of any database-driven application so using transactions is unavoidable in my mind.

This is probably more information than anyone needs but I like being open about some of the architectural decisions I made while developing Poker Maven, and how they impact users.

[VisualCSharp]

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OK I have it installed, it starts up, I allowed it in my F-scure firewall - the process is running when I check but nothing happens.

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You don't receive any message about Poker Maven being unable to contact an NTP server? Poker Maven beta needs to be able to contact a time server at pool.ntp.org UDP port 123 to retrieve the current UTC time in order to determine if the beta has expired. You may have to open this outbound port on your firewall. Give that a shot and get back to me. I'll definitely be monitoring this thread until this issue is solved.

Or, if you want to get really technical with me we can possibly set up a Remote Assistance session on Live Messenger so I can personally help you track down these issues. I want to get all these basic installation/first execution issues out of the way so people are able to use my product.

My Live ID is pokermaven@poker-analytics.com.

EDIT: I've seen the exact problem you're talking about on my own development workstation. The process would start but would just hang forever. I figured out after awhile that it was the NTP server not responding to my request for some reason. I added a timeout but the code for it may be broken. I'm looking into this as we type.

EDIT: I've researched similar issues online and I've discovered that others have had problems with the UdpClient .NET class, which I am using in Poker Maven. I will refactor my code to use a different class and release beta 0.9.2 soon.

[suffercity]

I will give you an advice. Be the first HUD-software that works on Betfair. Since it's a pretty big (non-us) site you will probably find a lot of coustomers there, Inclouding me.

[VisualCSharp]

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I will give you an advice. Be the first HUD-software that works on Betfair. Since it's a pretty big (non-us) site you will probably find a lot of coustomers there, Inclouding me.

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The stipulation for HUD integration is that hand histories are written to a folder somewhere. The HUD will detect a change in the hand history files, read the seat configuration from the latest hand history and update the HUD accordingly. Additionally there needs to be some way to tell who you are when you are seated at a table. Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars both say "Logged in as" in the title bar of the table so that's how I detect who you are. I guess I could also use a hand history file and detect who was dealt cards.

Regardless, Betfair needs to work similar to FTP and PS for the HUD to work.