Overview
BAXSQL is a data management tool developed to support the management of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets in the Medical Grid Project (MGP) testbed (
http://www.medgrid.org/). The package is built in-house and all written in C. It implements a client-server framework with the Ninf-G (
http://ninf.apgrid.org) middleware providing the necessary infrastructure. The client application runs in the user's local machine and can be used to interact with the server application running in MGP's remote data servers. It provides an interface for uploading data sets from the client machine to remote data servers, downloading data sets from remote data servers to the local machine, deleting existing data sets in remote data servers, visualizing remote data sets, and transforming remote data sets, among others. Users interact directly with the provided graphical user interface (GUI) built using the gtk+ library (
http://www.gtk.org/). Through this GUI, data transfer to and from the data server is made transparent and the remote data analyses are carried out as if the computations are performed locally.
The server application manages the storage of the actual fMRI data sets and employs a backend database server for storing fMRI metadata. It runs on the remote data servers. This component manages a local MySQL (
http://www.mysql.com) database used for the storage of fMRI metadata using the MySQL C API. Although MySQL is used here, extension to other database systems can be implemented. The server application is also responsible for the actual transfer of fMRI data sets from the data server to the requesting client machine and vice versa. It also supports several predefined functions that can be invoked to perform standard fMRI analysis on the stored data sets. Because it uses remote analysis servers to do the actual processing of the data, a significant reduction in processing time can be attained.
In the following sections, BAXSQL usage is detailed. If you have questions regarding BAXSQL, you can leave a comment at the end of the article. BAXSQL is a free software, PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY whatsoever. Use at your own risk. It is advised to have a backup copy of your datasets aside from the one stored in the BAXSQL dataserver.
