The design and implementation of two software systems introduced to improve
the efficiency of offline analysis of event data taken with the ZEUS Detector
at the HERA electron-proton collider at DESY are presented. Two different
approaches were made, one using a set of event directories and the other using
a tag database based on a commercial object-oriented database management
system. These are described and compared. Both systems provide quick direct
access to individual collision events in a sequential data store of several
terabytes, and they both considerably improve the event analysis efficiency. In
particular the tag database provides a very flexible selection mechanism and
can dramatically reduce the computing time needed to extract small subsamples
from the total event sample. Gains as large as a factor 20 have been obtained.Comment: Accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communication