In radio astronomy, radio frequency interference (RFI) refers to anysignal captured by a radio telescope that did not originate fromthe observed target in the sky. As RFI corrupts observational data and may damage radio telescope equipment, astronomers seek to store data on RFI, with the aim of mitigating or preventing future interference events. This is a concern for the MeerKAT telescope, a precursor to the planned powerful Square Kilometre Array telescope.
Currently, RFI data atMeerKAT is collected in many different file formats that do not fit into traditional database models created to store data in a fixed schema. Here, we design a scalable database model for RFI storage, that supports many databases and many data models. The database is deployed in a Dockerized environment. Preliminary testing of our design shows linear scaling of data ingestion as data sizes increases, as well as fast query processing
