Gaïa

The Gaïa Source Catalog

The Gaïa mission from the European Space Agency (ESA) is a space observatory designed to create the most precise 3D map of our galaxy, the Milky Way, mapping more than 1.8 billion celestial objects.

References

Our work is based on data from the Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC).

© Gaia Collaboration, ESA, DPAC.
Gaia data and documentation are available from the ESA Gaia Archive .

Reference publication:
Gaia Collaboration et al. (2023), Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties.

The SynSql gaia_source table

Based on data from the European Space Agency, we created the gaia_source table. With the same 152 columns and sql datatypes. With exactly 1,811,709,771 rows.

Data origin
The gaia_source table comes from the official Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3), published by the Gaia Collaboration, ESA, and DPAC.

We downloaded all GaiaSource_xxx_yyy_.csv.gz files from https://cdn.gea.esac.esa.int. Each file was splitted across 24 virtual machines and databases. The split was done according each row hash key on the source_id column.
Table structure
The gaia_source table contains the 152 columns
• source_id (unique identifier)
• ra, dec (sky position)
• parallax
• pmra, pmdec
• phot_g_mean_mag
• bp_rp

The full schema is documented in the official Gaia DR3 release notes.

How SynSQL stores Gaia

SynSQL distributes gaia_source across 600 partitions on 24 servers. Each partition is indexed on source_id and stored as a standard SQL table, allowing:
• fast ingestion of billions of rows,
• interactive SQL queries,
• horizontal scalability,
• natural resilience when nodes fail.

This architecture enables real‑time exploration of the Gaia catalog using standard SQL.

Query performance

Well... Your best way to check performances might be to go to the workspace →.

Gaia Open Live Workspace →