Databases for large detector systems—Experiences at LEP and future needs
E.M. Rimmer · AIP conference proceedings · 1990
The physical size of the LEP detectors at CERN, the quantity of information which they generate, and even the number of collaborators needed to build and run them, has shifted a large fraction of the associated software problems into the area of data management. Managing large volumes of data of all kinds for a variety of applications, from transport and storage to retrieval and analysis, has become, and will remain, the primary concern of many HEP programmers. All four LEP experiments have used a mixture of commerical and home‐grown database management systems to exploit their detectors. Despite some efforts to achieve coherence the same data appear in different systems, and essentially equivalent code has been written several times over to access and manipulate these data. What can we learn from the LEP experience to ensure that, for detectors at the LHC and SSC, we overcome the difficulties inherent in the informatin management challenge which they present?