Development of 2MASS Catalog Server Kit

TL;DR

This paper presents a software kit for constructing high-performance database servers for large astronomical catalogs, enabling fast spatial searches without relying on specialized indexing techniques.

Contribution

The authors develop an open-source, easily installable database system optimized for fast coordinate-based searches on large astronomical catalogs using standard RDBMS techniques.

Findings

Achieved fast radial search performance on the 2MASS catalog.

Implemented efficient rectangular search capabilities.

Demonstrated a low-cost, scalable approach for large catalog databases.

Abstract

We develop a software kit called "2MASS Catalog Server Kit" to easily construct a high-performance database server for the 2MASS Point Source Catalog (includes 470,992,970 objects) and several all-sky catalogs. Users can perform fast radial search and rectangular search using provided stored functions in SQL similar to SDSS SkyServer. Our software kit utilizes open-source RDBMS, and therefore any astronomers and developers can install our kit on their personal computers for research, observation, etc. Out kit is tuned for optimal coordinate search performance. We implement an effective radial search using an orthogonal coordinate system, which does not need any techniques that depend on HTM or HEALpix. Applying the xyz coordinate system to the database index, we can easily implement a system of fast radial search for relatively small (less than several million rows) catalogs. To enable high-speed search of huge catalogs on RDBMS, we apply three additional techniques: table partitioning, composite expression index, and optimization in stored functions. As a result, we obtain satisfactory performance of radial search for the 2MASS catalog. Our system can also perform fast rectangular search. It is implemented using techniques similar to those applied for radial search. Our way of implementation enables a compact system and will give important hints for a low-cost development of other huge catalog databases.