The Database part of the Laplace Transient Processing system is based on Microsoft Access Jet database engine version 3.7. The database file contains only structure definition (tables and relations) and data itself.
Data may be loaded into the base from within the measurement program through several interface routines. Some simple manipulation on data can be made from the measurement program. This includes inserting and modifying material and sample descriptions as well as storing description of the measurements and computed results.
Data maintenance, manipulation, reviewing, inspecting and visualisation are done from within a separate program. A Visual Basic program contains the entire user interface and data manipulation tools. The program may run as a separate application, without communicating with the measurement system. It can also run in parallel to the measurement program, in which case data loaded into the database during the experiment may be inspected immediately.
Neither raw measurement data nor computed spectra are stored in the base. What is stored is the information about measurement conditions or computing methods and results together with a pointer to the corresponding data file. Generally almost all the parameters describing the experiment are stored with the data inside the separate data files. While storing information in the database the information about the experiment setup is extracted from files and stored in the base. Only data that may be useful when processing and analysing results is kept in the database. Some additional information can be added to the information coming directly from the experiment and this can be stored only in the base. On the other hand, disk files contain some data which is not read into the base, e.g. some extra equipment settings as well as the data and spectra themselves.