CTA Catalogue

The CTA Catalogue stores all the metadata required to find the location of files on tape, to manage user access and quotas, as well as to keep track all the physical resources managed by the CTA infrastructure (tapes, tape pools, libraries, drives, etc.). It’s a persistant data layer, built over a relational database management system (RDBMS) backend, that is accessed by all tape servers and CTA frontends.

The CTA Catalogue schema is managed as a separate Gitlab project (cta/cta-catalogue-schema), which is then incorporated into the main CTA project as a git submodule. This allows us to keep development and versioning independent between both projects, which makes the work of the CTA team much simpler and less error-prone.

CTA Catalogue schema

The CTA Catalogue schema diagram is automatically generated by the Gitlab CI. It can be consulted in the cta/cta-catalogue-schema artifacts, updated for every new commit of the main branch.

CTA Catalogue schema upgrade/deployment

Warning

For extra safety, before upgrading a production DB, always test a catalogue upgrade with a clone of the production DB.

For instructions on how to upgrade or deploy the CTA Catalogue schema, please refer to the upgrade procedure on this manual.

CTA Catalogue development

For instructions on how to contribute to the CTA Catalogue schema development, please refer to CTA Catalogue schema development documentation.

The CTA Catalogue Schema