A slot is a position within a group or series or sequence. A slot can also be a physical opening, such as an aperture in the wing of an aircraft. In computing, a slot can be a place in memory where data is stored, or a software interface. In a slot machine, players insert cash or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, paper tickets with barcodes into a slot to activate the machine and then spin reels to rearrange symbols to create winning combinations of credits. When a winning combination is struck, the player receives the number of credits stated on the pay table.
In football, a wide receiver that lines up close to the center of the field is known as a slot receiver. These receivers are expected to be reliable targets for the quarterback, especially on obvious passing downs when they can be counted on to break a few tackles and get into the middle of the field for a first down or big gain. A good slot receiver is fast enough to beat linebackers to the ball and has the ability to make defenders miss.
Periodic slots are a special type of time series slot that can be accessed from RPL using standard series syntax, e.g. DateTime: Slot[ ]. The difference between periodic slots and ordinary time series slots is that they have the ability to be configured for periods, intervals, and data interpolation settings. Additionally, they can be used to define a set of lookup values for a particular range of dates.
When you select a slot in the viewer, it opens its own Slot dialog. From the Slot dialog, you can view a specific scalar or table slot and, if necessary, edit its value directly without first opening the slot’s configuration dialog. In addition, you can use the Compression Mode menu to configure how the slot is compressed.
In an iterative MRM, a periodic slot can be used to store values for a run index. These values can then be used as input to an iteration, allowing you to see how the values have changed over time. In this way, a periodic slot acts as an iterative MRM table.