The Redesigned BaBar Event Store: Believe the Hype

TL;DR

The paper discusses a comprehensive redesign of the BaBar experiment's event storage system to improve performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency based on real-world usage experience.

Contribution

It introduces a redesigned event store that eliminates redundant features, enhances performance, and reduces storage costs, tailored to current operational demands.

Findings

Improved system performance and scalability.

Reduced physical storage costs.

Enhanced flexibility and data consistency.

Abstract

As the BaBar experiment progresses, it produces new and unforeseen requirements and increasing demands on capacity and feature base. The current system is being utilized well beyond its original design specifications, and has scaled appropriately, maintaining data consistency and durability. The persistent event storage system has remained largely unchanged since the initial implementation, and thus includes many design features which have become performance bottlenecks. Programming interfaces were designed before sufficient usage information became available. Performance and efficiency were traded off for added flexibility to cope with future demands. With significant experience in managing actual production data under our belt, we are now in a position to recraft the system to better suit current needs. The Event Store redesign is intended to eliminate redundant features while adding new ones, increase overall performance, and contain the physical storage cost of the world's largest database.