ADQL and TAP hands-on

If you are an astronomer, you probably have worked with relational data
quite a bit already.  Object catalogs are an example, but observational
metadata or simulation results often have a very natural relational
representation, too.  Basically, if it's a table, it's relational.

In the wider world of information technology, a powerful theory and
robust tooling for dealing with relational data have been created:
relational algebra and database systems that can be queried in the
Structured Query Language (SQL).  The Virtual Observatory has adopted
these technologies and defined the Table Access Protocol TAP and the
SQL-like query language ADQL to offer a uniform interface to such
services.  More and more data sets are published TAP-first; a prominent
example is Gaia's results.

This course will teach you how to write good queries (which are
essentially the small programs executed by the database), how to
combine your own local data with server-side information, how to do
simple discovery, and how TAP helps you to do all that.  The course is
hands-on, so you should bring a computer with TOPCAT
(http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/; Debian package: topcat)
installed.