Catalog Server Kit

[M. Ohishi]

Dear IVOA,

One of our young researcher has published a paper, "Development of 2MASS Catalog 
Server Kit", at
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663234 . If you find this paper interesting, 
please contact to the author (Chisato Yamauchi chisato.yamauchi at nao.ac.jp ).

With best regards,
   Masatoshi Ohishi, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

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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.