EPIC Database Management Using MySQL

EPIC is an oceanographic data management, display, and analysis system, developed at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory for management, display and analysis of large collections of oceanographic hydrographic and time series in-situ data sets. This paper describes an improved, flexible, updated data management system for in-situ data, residing on a Unix disk in EPIC netCDF format, using the freely available MySQL database.

Metadata, the information about the data, as well as the data attributes are stored in the MySQL database. The metadata can be accessed using a command-line inteactive program or via World Wide Web through EPIC Web Browser. Data loading procedures also update the Web pages for EPIC Web gateway (http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/epic/ewb/) automatically to provide accurate data inventory information. The current EPIC database at PMEL contains more than 1.5 million oceanographic profiles (such as CTD, Bottle, and XBT data from Pacific, FOCI, Puget Sound, VENTS, and NODC World Ocean Database, etc.) and time series (such as surface meteorology data, ocean data , and drifter buoy data from Alaska, Arctic, Puget Sound, etc. and Sea Level data from University Hawaii Sea Level Center). See http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/epic/ and http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/epic/software/ep_dbprograms.htm.