SDSS DB Download

SDSS DR7 catalog data now available for download!

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Data Release 7 catalog database, BestDR7 is available to the public for download. The entire BestDR7 database and the DR6 catalog databases are distributed by the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), whereas smaller subsets of the catalog data are available on demand from JHU.

Please go to the SDSS data download page at NCDM to download the DR7 or DR6 data, or contact JHU for other (smaller) datasets.

You will need at least twice the size of the dataset available on disk to restore the database from the backup that you will download. This does not all have to be on the same drive, as you can restore from a different (network-mounted) drive than the one hosting the database. On the drive that contains the restored database, it is recommended that you have about 1.3-1.5 times the space needed for the data itself, to allow for tempdb expansion and log file expansion.

You can download an example of the restore script here.

There is also an ZIP of the SkyServer website available. This is intended for those working on mirrors or translations. Please click on the Website page in the menu to download the SkyServer website.