Schedule - PGConf.EU 2014
Ruling the Galaxy with PostgreSQL: Stories from the ESA Gaia Archive
Date: 2014-10-23
Time: 11:50–12:40
Room: Medici III
Level: Beginner
The European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission will survey the sky for at least 5 years measuring high accuracy astrometry, radial velocities and multi-colour photometry. The Data Analysis and Processing Consortium (DPAC) efforts will result in an astronomical catalogue with unprecedented accuracy and completeness of up to 1 billion (1E9) sources, about 1 percent of the Galactic stellar population. Efficient scientific exploitation of this data set will require the development of software services for the storage, access, retrieval and mining of this data.
Modules such as pgSphere and Q3C have made PostgreSQL the default choice for the storage, geometrical query and crossmatch of astronomical catalogues. Its utilization in combination with Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols such as TAP has become a widespread practice in Astronomical Data Centres for serving their catalogues to the scientific community and general public.
In the heart of the Gaia Archive, the Core Systems developed at ESAC (Madrid) will use, among other database technologies, PostgreSQL instances. In this talk we will briefly describe the overall architecture currently implemented, details about the administration of this large instance, the usage cases fulfilled and performance attained. We will also make an overview of the open points for development.
