RD45 - Recommendations for 1997

• Provide the object-persistency services required for the alpha release of GEANT-4,
• Investigate innovative ways of handling the meta-data associated with HEP event data, in particular, provide prototypes which demonstrate the possibilities of managing persistent collections of data, the selections which produced these collections, and the predicates themselves as part of a single, coherent, ODBMS,
• Perform further tests of replication in ODBMSs, particularly across heterogeneous platforms, with larger numbers of database images (>> 3) and in the wide-area,
• Investigate to what extent the use of Objectivity "partitions" and multiple federations can satisfy the requirements for private and semi-private data and schema,
• Make further tests of schema evolution, testing scenarios typical of the HEP environment, such as the addition of a small number of new data members to existing classes,
• Participate in the beta-test program of the next two releases of Objectivity and determine to what extent the new features of these releases satisfy the list of outstanding HEP requirements and whether reported bugs have been fixed in these releases,
• Perform an initial evaluation of the Objectivity/DB Java binding, including the possibilities of sharing objects between C++ and Java,
• Continue to participate in the ODMG as a reviewer member,
• Undertake performance and scalability tests of an alternative ODBMS product, currently assumed to be Versant,
• Investigate and report in the issues involved with moving persistent applications and data between the products of different ODBMS vendors,
• Establish a problem tracking system, to be used both for handling bug reports and for the management of the list of HEP requirements on an ODBMS,
• Collaborate with other HEP projects investigating and using similar technology, including the Zeus experiment at DESY, the BaBar experiment at SLAC, the BELLE experiment at KEK and the Caltech/CERN/HP joint project at Caltech,
• Continue collaboration with the LHC Computing Model Working groups.