Inter-operability with Starbase

Starbase is a simple relational database management system (RDBMS) for manipulating astronomical catalogues and tables. It was developed by John Roll of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. It comprises a collection of programs which use standard Unix features and tools. The basic facilities of Starbase are similar to the Unix RDBMS /rdb.

Starbase operates on tables in the Tab-Separated Table (TST) format (see Appendix ). It works best on small tables of fewer than 10,000 rows. Starbase can inter-operate with CURSA, though obviously only on catalogues in the TST format. If you wish to use Starbase with catalogues that are not in the TST format then use catcopy (see Section ) to convert them to this format.

Further information about Starbase is available from its `home page' at URL:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~john/starbase/starbase.html

Copies of Starbase can be obtained from this location. Also, there is a list of `frequently asked questions' (FAQs) about Starbase at URL:

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~bima/starbase/