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Title: Relational Databases in Astronomy
Speaker: Dr. Luciano Nicastro
Time: July 1, 2011 (Friday) 9:00 AM
Location: middle conference room, 3rd floor Abstract：
Efficient managing and exploring of large data sets has become a challenge in all fields of science. Astronomy is certainly one of the fields where, thanks to the technological improvements of the detectors being used, the amount of collected data is growing at an impressive rate. This at all wavelengths. International projects like the International Virtual Observatory, the CDS-Strasbourg, ESO-NASA astronomical data archives, etc., are trying to help scientists to navigate into the, so far, heterogeneous archives. However every project, even relatively small, would greatly benefit from the use of a dedicated database management system (DBMS). The most common type of database systems are the "relational database". Nowadays very effective free database managers are available. For some applications they are even more effective than the commercial ones. As an example, the DB software used by web tools like Google is open source. They are very effective in managing in an "associative" (relational) way several sets of data. For example one can ask: "give me the magnitude of star X over the entire electromagnetic spectrum". The DBMS, based on the star name or coordinates, will gather information from several tablesyou're your computer or anywhere on the Internet, and return "a single" answer. Installing and managing a DBMS is not too different from installing and using a standard software package. From the user point of view, it is even simpler. In fact retrieving information or data from a DBMS is as simple as making "reasonable questions" and receiving, in a chosen format, all the answers that satisfy that question. Of course one has to know the language DBs speak (SQL) or use user interfaces (e.g via WEB) that, based on a reduced set of options, build and execute the query for you. In this seminar I will illustrate the basic concepts of relational databases and will give some usage examples related to Astronomy.
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