Multipurpose Database Management Systems for Marine Environmental Research

Two special marine database management systems which are developed by the Database Laboratory of the Marine Hydrophysical Institute are described in this paper. The first system (CruBase) was developed to provide the effective management of the data of oceanographic cruises (multiship surveys). The data of up to 320 measured variables for 3000–4000 oceanographic stations can be stored in each database. The main advantage of the system is the possibility to make the cross-discipline cross-variable queries. It contains a special subsystem that provides an effective quality control of the data loaded into the system. The second system (OceanBase) does not have the same limitations for the number of stations and variables. It consists of the modified CruBase system and commercial DBMS FoxPro. Both systems have been widely used in recent years in many projects related to the Black Sea environment.