Data Mining the SDSS SkyServer Database

TL;DR

This paper details the design, implementation, and performance of a database system supporting interactive queries and data access for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, enabling efficient exploration of large astronomical datasets.

Contribution

It presents the database architecture, data loading pipeline, and query performance analysis for SDSS SkyServer, demonstrating effective support for scientific data exploration.

Findings

Most queries execute in under 20 seconds

The system supports interactive exploration of large datasets

SQL queries are optimized for rapid response

Abstract

An earlier paper (Szalay et. al. "Designing and Mining MultiTerabyte Astronomy Archives: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey," ACM SIGMOD 2000) described the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's (SDSS) data management needs by defining twenty database queries and twelve data visualization tasks that a good data management system should support. We built a database and interfaces to support both the query load and also a website for ad-hoc access. This paper reports on the database design, describes the data loading pipeline, and reports on the query implementation and performance. The queries typically translated to a single SQL statement. Most queries run in less than 20 seconds, allowing scientists to interactively explore the database. This paper is an in-depth tour of those queries. Readers should first have studied the companion overview paper Szalay et. al. "The SDSS SkyServer, Public Access to the Sloan Digital Sky Server Data" ACM SIGMOND 2002.