Object Databases in the LHCb1 Experiment

Database systems are very important in any HEP2 experiment in the world. HEP community in LHC3 era is in transition from FORTRAN to C++ and from data streams to persistent objects. Together with that a new data management will be necessary, which would allow transition from “files and tapes” approach towards the access to data in form of objects by selection of their required physics contents. In order to conform to the object-oriented paradigm, LHCb has to heavily investigate in the design and development of object databases for both the on-line (data acquisition and real-time processing) and off-line (simulation, reconstruction and analysis) computing environments, e.g. the Event Store, Detector Description Database, Calibration and Alignment Database etc. The focus of this article is on the Gaudi[2][3] framework and its very important part the detector description database.