Analyzing high energy physics data using databases: a case study

We describe the initial work of the PASS Project which uses techniques from distributed object management to analyze experimental data from high energy physics. At this time, we have designed two prototypes to analyze high energy physics data from the CDF experiment at Fermi Lab. The data from this experiment consists of "events" which describe particle collisions. Each event consists of several hundred numerical attributes and occupies approximately 10 K in a compressed format. We describe our experience analyzing this data using a relational database, an object oriented database, and a persistent object manager.<<ETX>>