Author: Steinmetz, S.
Paper Title Page
MOPMS030 Improvement of the Oracle Setup and Database Design at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center 393
 
  • K. Höppner, Th. Haberer, J.M. Mosthaf, A. Peters
    HIT, Heidelberg, Germany
  • G. Fröhlich, S. Jülicher, V.RW. Schaa, W. Schiebel, S. Steinmetz
    GSI, Darmstadt, Germany
  • M. Thomas, A. Welde
    Eckelmann AG, Wiesbaden, Germany
 
  The HIT (Heidelberg Ion Therapy) center is an accelerator facility for cancer therapy using both carbon ions and protons, located at the university hospital in Heidelberg. It provides three therapy treatment rooms: two with fixed beam exit (both in clinical use), and a unique gantry with a rotating beam head, currently under commissioning. The backbone of the proprietary accelerator control system consists of an Oracle database running on a Windows server, storing and delivering data of beam cycles, error logging, measured values, and the device parameters and beam settings for about 100,000 combinations of energy, beam size and particle number used in treatment plans. Since going operational, we found some performance problems with the current database setup. Thus, we started an analysis in cooperation with the industrial supplier of the control system (Eckelmann AG) and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung. It focused on the following topics: hardware resources of the DB server, configuration of the Oracle instance, and a review of the database design that underwent several changes since its original design. The analysis revealed issues on all fields. The outdated server will be replaced by a state-of-the-art machine soon. We will present improvements of the Oracle configuration, the optimization of SQL statements, and the performance tuning of database design by adding new indexes which proved directly visible in accelerator operation, while data integrity was improved by additional foreign key constraints.  
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