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Paper: ESO Catalogue Facility Design and Performance
Volume: 475, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXII
Page: 219
Authors: Moins, C.; Retzlaff, J.; Arnaboldi, M.; Zampieri, S.; Delmotte, N.; Forchí, V.; Klein Gebbinck, M.; Lockhart, J.; Micol, A.; Vera Sequeiros, I.; Bierwirth, T.; Peron, M.; Romaniello, M.; Suchar, D.
Abstract: The ESO Phase 3 Catalogue Facility provides investigators with the possibility to ingest catalogues resulting from ESO public surveys and large programs and to query and download their content according to positional and non-positional criteria. It relies on a chain of tools that covers the complete workflow from submission to validation and ingestion into the ESO archive and catalogue repository and a web application to browse and query catalogues. This repository consists of two components. One is a Sybase ASE relational database where catalogue meta-data are stored. The second one is a Sybase IQ data warehouse where the content of each catalogue is ingested in a specific table that returns all records matching a user's query. Spatial indexing has been implemented in Sybase IQ to speed up positional queries and relies on the Spherical Geometry Toolkit from the Johns Hopkins University which implements the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) algorithm. It is based on a recursive decomposition of the celestial sphere in spherical triangles and the assignment of an index to each of them. It has been complemented with the use of optimized indexes on the non-positional columns that are likely to be frequently used as query constraints. First tests performed on catalogues such as 2MASS have confirmed that this approach provides a very good level of performance and a smooth user experience that are likely to facilitate the scientific exploitation of catalogues.
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