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DR1 Catalog Archive Server (CAS)

The following databases are available
BESTDR1Default, the best Photo, Spectro and Tiling data
TARGDR1Photo, frozen at time of target selection
SkyServerV3EDR, V3 (old) data model, for comparison

Quick Guide

To run a query on one of the DR1 DBs other than BESTDR1, name the database
explicitly in the query, like

SELECT TOP 100 * FROM TARGDR1..PhotoObj WHERE r<17 and r-i>2

  • If there is no dbname used, the query will default to the BESTDR1 database
  • The documentation on this website is for the updated data model (v4)
  • The queries are limited to 10mins and 10k rows. If you want to run longer
    queries, please contact the SDSS Help Desk for a higher priority access, requiring registration.

OTHER ACCESS TOOLS AND SAMPLE QUERIES

You can submit queries with the SDSS Query Analyzer (sdssQA) Java application, which can be downloaded here, and contains 25 sample queries.

You can run queries on this skyserver directly using Robert Lupton's emacs interface at: http://astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/skyserver/skyserver.el (download) . There are also sample queries on this site in the examples.sql file.

You can also run command-line queries on the DR1 databases using Tamas Budavari's Python tool sqlcl at the sqlcl download page.

Note that both the emacs interface and sqlcl submit queries via the skyServer, so they are subject to the same execution time and row limits as this page. The sdssQA is the only interface that goes directly to the databases (using ODBC), so it is not subject to the same restrictions as the SkyServer.

You can link to the SQL search page directly via a URL:
http://skyserver.pha.jhu.edu/dr1/en/tools/search/x_sql.asp,
which takes two parameters:

cmdThe body of the SQL command, with URL-encoding
formatHTML: as a normal web output in tabular form
XML: as an xml document
CSV: as a comma separated ASCII values with a header line

EXAMPLE:

If you wanted to run the following query : SELECT TOP 20 * FROM Galaxy WHERE r<17, and get back the result as a csv file, then you would run the following command line process:

wget -q -O "out.csv" "http://skyserver.pha.jhu.edu/dr1/en/tools/search/x_sql.asp?format=csv
&cmd=SELECT%20TOP%2010%20*%20FROM%20Galaxy%20WHERE%20r%3C17"

June 11, 2003 Ani Thakar, JHU