Applications of Open-source Spatio-Temporal Database Systems in Wide-field Time-domain Astronomy

We present our experiences with open-source spatio-temporal database systems for managing and analyzing big astronomical data acquired by wide-field time-domain sky surveys. Considering performance, cost, difficulty, and scalability of the database systems, we conduct comparison studies of open-source spatio-temporal databases such as GeoMesa and PostGIS that are already being used for handling big geographical data. Our experiments include ingesting, indexing, and querying millions or billions of astronomical spatio-temporal data. We choose the public VVV (VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea) catalogs of billions measurements for hundreds of millions objects as the test data. We discuss issues of how these spatio-temporal database systems can be adopted in the astronomy community.