The SDSS SkyServer: Public Access to the Sloan Digital Sky Server Data
  The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digi-tal Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and archi-tecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform for research on database algorithms and performance. 
Alexander S. Szalay, Jim Gray, Ani R. Thakar, Peter Z. Kunszt, Tanu   Malik, Jordan Raddick, Christopher Stoughton, Jan vand...