Objectivity Data Migration

In this article we describe the migration of event data collected by the COMPASS and HARP experiments at CERN. Together these experiments have over 300TB of physics data stored in Objectivity/DB that had to be transferred to a new data management system by the end of Q1 2003 and Q2 2003 respectively. To achieve this, data needed to be processed with a rate close to 100MB/s, employing 14 tape drives and a cluster of 30 Linux servers. The new persistency solution to accommodate the data is built upon relational databases for metadata storage and standard "flat" files for the event data. The databases contain collections of 109 events and allow generic queries or direct navigational access to the data, preserving the original C++ user API. The central data repository at CERN is implemented using several Oracle9i servers on Linux and the CERN Mass Storage System CASTOR.