Organizing the LSST database for real-time astronomical processing

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will catalog billions of astronomical objects and trillions of sources, all of which will be stored and managed by a database management system. One of the main challenges is real-time alert generation. To generate alerts, up to 100K new difference detections have to be cross-correlated with the huge historical catalogs, and then further processed to prune false alerts. This paper explains the challenges, the implementation of the LSST Association Pipeline and the database organization strategies we are planning to use to meet the real-time requirements, including data partitioning. parallelization, and pre-loading.