The Sirius example represents telephone service provisioning information. In the telecommunications industry, the term provisioning refers to the steps necessary to convert an order for phone service into the actual service. To track AT&T's provisioning process, the Sirius project compiles weekly summaries of the state of certain types of phone service orders. These ASCII summaries store the summary date and one record per order. Each order record contains a header followed by a sequence of events. The header has 13 pipe separated fields: the order number, AT&T's internal order number, the order version, four different telephone numbers associated with the order, the zip code of the order, a billing identifier, the order type, a measure of the complexity of the order, an unused field, and the source of the order data. Many of these fields are optional, in which case nothing appears between the pipe characters. The billing identifier may not be available at the time of processing, in which case the system generates a unique identifier, and prefixes this value with the string ``no_ii'' to indicate the number was generated. The event sequence represents the various states a service order goes through; it is represented as a new-line terminated, pipe separated list of state, timestamp pairs. There are over 400 distinct states that an order may go through during provisioning. The sequence is sorted in order of increasing timestamps.
A first suggestion is to experiment with the XQuery query, to select different fields from the PADS-processed output. Depending on your depth of knowledge of XQuery, you could choose queries which focus on specific fields, or combinations of fields.
Note that there are three input records in the provided sample. A second suggestion is to change the input data to explore how PADS handles error conditions.
Please experiment as you wish - and notify us if you find problems.