At the Brokers workshop in April 2021, we had a productive discussion about the use of various back-end database technologies (e.g. SQL, No-SQL, Graph, Object) which various brokers have adopted for their query engines. Amongst various topics we discussed use of these technologies in facilitating flexible (especially spatially indexed) queries, and deployment challenges in cloud-based infrastructures. Although there are plenty of generic discussion forums geared towards these themes, few, if any, provide an astronomy oriented approach. Hence I propose a sub-category under “Data Management” named “Tech”. The category is initially aimed at broker developers, but of course we welcome contributors from anyone in the Rubin community.
Under the “About” section, I propose:
A forum for discussing back-end database technology implementations, initially aimed at broker developers, relating to curation and querying of Rubin data.
If the goal of this subforum is to discuss brokers and database technology, I’d suggest calling it “database” or “broker development”: just “tech” is far too generic.
These kinds of technical discussions between brokers developers, Rubin staff, and the science community (everyone and anyone, really) would be very appropriate for the Alerts & Brokers category.
Alternatively to making a new category, perhaps we should just update the “About the Alerts & Brokers Category” topic for that category to make this clearer?
Discussion of making it a new category is still open though.
Many thanks for the helpful suggestions! Agreed - maybe “Tech” is just too generic. Happy to have it under the Alerts & Brokers category. Looks like we haven’t been very busy there, so even a simple topic under there won’t exactly get lost! At least initially. Is it possible to have a “Database” or “Databases” or “Database Technologies” tag or subtopic? Don’t worry if not.
And thank YOU for using the Community Forum @genghisken!!
“Alerts & Brokers” is already a sub-category (of Science) and we don’t have sub-sub-categories, but all technical discussions like you described could carried out by starting new topics in the Alerts & Brokers category.
You’re right that tags are also useful for this situation. I only found a few relevant existing tags (alert, brokers, and sql) but more can easily be made. I can see that your user account, @genghisken, has a trust level of three which means you can create new tags.
