The Event Browser: An Intuitive Approach to Browsing BaBar Object Databases

Providing efficient access to more than 300TB of experiment data is the responsibility of the BaBar{sup 1} Databases Group. Unlike generic tools, The Event Browser presents users with an abstraction of the BaBar data model. Multithreaded CORBA{sup 2} servers perform database operations using small transactions in an effort to avoid lock contention issues and provide adequate response times. The GUI client is implemented in Java and can be easily deployed throughout the community in the form of a web applet. The browser allows users to examine collections of related physics events and identify associations between the collections and the physical files in which they reside, helping administrators distribute data to other sites worldwide. This paper discusses the various aspects of the Event Browser including requirements, design challenges and key features of the current implementation.