Common browsing and retrieval of technical and experimental data for steady state experiments

Steady state experiments like Wendelstein 7-X have to deal with large amounts of data of different kind. Discharge lengths may last from less than a second up to 30 min. During this time diagnostics will measure data in different discharge phases with different rates depending on the physical program. Furthermore the technical configuration of all devices must be logged during the discharge as well as between experiment phases. This is necessary to allow supervision of constantly running devices. All measured data must be stored together in a common database to make it easily accessible and reduce the effort to combine data. Because of these requirements a continuous data acquisition system must be provided where data may exist at any time. Intelligent methods for browsing and retrieval of the acquired data from the common database are desired. This includes calendar-based time interval selection, overview plots for intervals that cover several days and online views of the last stored data. The contribution will explain the challenges and the advantages induced by this kind of data access methods. Existing and planned solutions for Wendelstein 7-X will be depicted. Particularly the “Data Browser” – a graphical tool specially designed to fulfil these tasks at W7-X – will be presented.