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In many existing controls projects the central database/inventory was introduced late in the project, usually to support installation or maintenance activities. Thus construction of this database was done in a bottom-up fashion by reverse engineering the installation. However, there are several benefits if the central database is introduced early in machine design, such as the ability to simulate the system as a whole without having all the IOCs in place, it can be used as an input to the installation/commissioning plan, or act as an enforcer of certain conventions and quality processes. Based on our experience with the control systems, we have designed a central database BLED (Best and Leanest Ever Database), which is used for storage of all machine configuration and parameters as well as control system configuration, inventory, and cabling. First implementation of BLED supports EPICS, meaning it is capable of storage and generation of EPICS templates and substitution files as well as archive, alarm and other configurations. With a goal in mind to provide functionality of several existing central databases (IRMIS, SNS db, DBSF etc.) a lot of effort has been made to design the database in a way to handle extremely large set-ups, consisting of millions of control system points. Furthermore, BLED also stores the lattice data, thus providing additional information (e.g. survey data) required by different engineering groups. The lattice import/export tools among others support MAD and TraceWin Tools formats which are widely used in the machine design community.
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