Database Archiving System for Supervision Systems at CERN: a Successful Upgrade Story

Almost 200 controls applications, in domains like LHC magnet protection, cryogenics and vacuum systems, cooling-and-ventilation or electrical network supervision, have been developed and are currently maintained by the CERN Industrial Controls Group in close collaboration with several equipment groups. The supervision layer of these systems is based on the same technologies as 400 other systems running in the LHC Experiments (e.g. WinCC Open Architecture, Oracle). During the last two-year LHC Long Shutdown 1, the 200 systems have been successfully migrated from a file-based archiver to a centralized infrastructure based on Oracle databases. This migration has homogenized the archiving chain for all CERN systems, and at the same time has presented a number of additional challenges. The paper presents the design, the necessary optimizations and the migration process that allowed us to meet unprecedented data-archiving rates (unachievable for the previously used system), and liaise with the existing long-term storage system (LHC LoggingDB) to assure data-continuity.