Sky Server - The Sloan Digital Sky survey
For all you people out there who are interested in astrnomy, this is something that you must read. Actually, I'm quite interested in space, astronomy etc and in fact in a seperate post, I will discuss my readings about the book called String Theory, by Green.
Well, this project is a research project that has been done by a lot of students from Johns Hopkins and other schools and head by Jim Gray, a noted computer scientist. The presenter of this session was Jim Gray himself!! The aim of this survey is map out the universe and represent all of the information using a federation of web and database servers so that scientists can tap into its knowledge base and mine for data. This is a project of mamoth proportions and runs into several terrabytes of data and guess what is the backend?? SQL Server!! Data is stored as images in the database and a .NET web services are used to assemble the data onto canvases (read memory streams) and then sent back to the user in real-time. Ultimately, one day, we might have a virtual observatory!! I think its a great idea to have something like this and I'm going to have a crack at this site and its contents as soon as I get back home...
You can know more about this site by visting http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/. You can also visit http://skyserver.org which gives you downloads that you can use to build your own sky server node. Information regarding the database schemas and code is also present and can be a very good insight of learning.