On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Reagan Moore wrote:
> We have the technology to map from an XML specification of
> attributes, values, and operations on values, to the SQL required by
> a particular database (Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQLServer, PostgresSQL,
> Informix).
> The technology does require the registration of the table structure,
> foreign keys, and schema of each database for the automation of the
> SQL generation.
> Are there other types of databases in current use?
That depends what you mean by "types". Quite a number of well-used astronomical data archives don't rely on commercial or even free RDBMS, they use an astronomer-written DBMS. The LEDAS facility here, for example (ledas-www.star.le.ac.uk) now supports searching of USNO-B1.0 - but this isn't loaded into any DBMS, but uses the WCSTOOLS software written at CfA which access the USNO-B data files in their distribution format, and unpacks them on the fly. Seems efficient enough to me for simple cone searches (we don't yet support cross-matching with other catalogues). Other places do something similar: when I asked Francois Ochsenbein if he had managed to ingest the whole of USNO-B1.0 (over a billion rows) into Sybase he told me that it was too large and he hadn't even attempted it. I don't know how Vizier serves it up (maybe Francois can tell us) but I expect CDS wrote the software in-house. So these systems don't speak SQL at all.
There are also one or two facilities using object-oriented DBMS - we use O2 here for our internal XMM-Newton operations, and are about to make its interface public. This speaks OQL - semi-standarized, but not the same as SQL.
By the way, you left MySQL of your list of RDBMS - perhaps the most widely used one in astronomy?
-- Clive Page, Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, Tel +44 116 252 3551 Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K. Fax +44 116 252 3311Received on 2003-02-28Z10:14:15