As a dedicated synthetic aperture radio interferometer, the MingantU SpEctral
Radioheliograph (MUSER), initially known as the Chinese Spectral
RadioHeliograph (CSRH), has entered the stage of routine observation. More than
23 million data records per day need to be effectively managed to provide high
performance data query and retrieval for scientific data reduction. In light of
these massive amounts of data generated by the MUSER, in this paper, a novel
data management technique called the negative database (ND) is proposed and
used to implement a data management system for the MUSER. Based on the
key-value database, the ND technique makes complete utilization of the
complement set of observational data to derive the requisite information.
Experimental results showed that the proposed ND can significantly reduce
storage volume in comparison with a relational database management system
(RDBMS). Even when considering the time needed to derive records that were
absent, its overall performance, including querying and deriving the data of
the ND, is comparable with that of an RDBMS. The ND technique effectively
solves the problem of massive data storage for the MUSER, and is a valuable
reference for the massive data management required in next-generation
telescopes