Building, running and dismantling the world's largest scientific instrument with the same database tools

Many people have heard of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and its enormous scientific masterpiece LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider. This is a 27-kilometer long particle accelerator designed to peek deeply inside the structure of matter in the framework of fundamental research. Despite the millions of Internet users, few of them know that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN in 1989, the same year that LEP was commissioned. Even fewer people know that CERN was among the first European organisations to have purchased the Oracle RDBMS back in 1983 and effectively put it in use for mission critical data management applications. Since that date, Oracle databases have been used extensively at CERN and in particular for technical and scientific data. This paper gives an overview of the use of Oracle throughout the lifecycle of CERN's flagship: the construction, exploitation and dismantling of LEP.