DatAlign - implementation of the new APS survey and alignment database

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is a national 3rd-generation synchrotron-radiation light source research facility located about twenty-five miles southwest of Chicago. The APS accelerator systems and X-ray beamlines are approximately six kilometers in length with more than four thousand precisely aligned components. The APS Survey and Alignment Group (SAG) is responsible for the correct positioning of beamline components for the APS accelerator systems. SAG fiducializes beamline components, aligns components in the accelerator tunnel and in the experiment hall, and maintains all necessary geodetic control networks to achieve required placement tolerances. All these tasks generate large amounts of data that have to be stored and readily accessible to the SAG members. As a result, the utilization of a database system is inevitable. During the 1990s, the SAG depended on Geonet software (1) for its data storage and management needs. Geonet was originally developed under the DOS environment at SLAC in the 1980s as an all-inclusive software package for the accelerator alignment community. After a decade of a reliable service, Geonet unavoidably became obsolete. First, some Geonet utilities, like data collection and data reduction programs, were phased out or replaced by new tools to keep up with advancements in survey and alignment technology. By the year 2002, a decision was made to also replace the database portion of Geonet with a new relational database. The conceptual design of the new APS Survey and Alignment Database (2) was completed in 2002. After a review of commercially available database management systems (DBMSs), Microsoft(regsign) Access 2000 was chosen for the implementation of our database design. The implementation of the new database (DB), under the name 'DatAlign,' commenced the following year.