RE: IAUC 183

["Albertson, Chris" <CAlbertson@primeadvantage.com>]

This is a good suggestion.  Kind of like what Tom
suggested about letting people with SCT systems
contribute.

All we have to do it make our database software a
little bit more general purpose and it becomes attractive
to other projects.  With even more luck programmers
working on these other projects can contribute back to
a common database software pool.

Maybe the way to get this started is we offer to house
some other project's data?

One of the nice things about Postgresql is that you can
extend the query language with specialized functions and
add new data types.  One example would be to implement
the "Welch variability index" as a Postgresql function.
Then you could do a simple query like "All stars where
index > x.".  RA and Dec data types would be nice too
along with some simple spherical trig operators.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Welch [mailto:welch@physics.mcmaster.ca]
> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 11:56 AM
> To: TASS List
> Subject: IAUC 183
> 
> 
> 
> I have just returned from IAU Colloquium 183 in Taiwan
> ("Small Telescope Astronomy on Global Scales") and am
> putting together a summary of the meeting and my reactions
> to it. Just catching up on reading the e-mail I've missed 
> in the past week, I have to say that the idea of producing
> a useful, portable database backend for survey systems
> would be real achievement. It is definitely a weak point
> in many of the planned small telescope operations. Getting
> a few surveys to share such a database interface would
> be a significant achievement. (This would likely have to
> be a PostgreSQL database if it were to be usable by most of
> the workers I heard at the meeting.)
> 
> Cheers,
> Doug
>