Today's sequencing technology allows sequencing an individual genome within a
few weeks for a fraction of the costs of the original Human Genome project.
Genomics labs are faced with dozens of TB of data per week that have to be
automatically processed and made available to scientists for further analysis.
This paper explores the potential and the limitations of using relational
database systems as the data processing platform for high-throughput genomics.
In particular, we are interested in the storage management for high-throughput
sequence data and in leveraging SQL and user-defined functions for data
analysis inside a database system. We give an overview of a database design for
high-throughput genomics, how we used a SQL Server database in some
unconventional ways to prototype this scenario, and we will discuss some
initial findings about the scalability and performance of such a more
database-centric approach.