In the past, Reclamation managed data for water operations and planning in a decentralized and variable manner.
Data were scattered throughout various systems and personal spreadsheets, and were often incomplete or inconsistent.
In addition, data were not documented with respect to its source, quality control was minimal, and time-aggregated
summary data were usually manually generated. This situation was not conducive to support efficient data analysis,
interpretation, reporting, and research and made it difficult to share data management applications among sites.
What is the goal of HDB?
The goal of the HDB project is the production of effective tools that utilize the best of proven and new technology
for management of data for water operations, planning and water accounting.
What is the history of HDB development?
HDB was one of the projects sponsored by the Watershed and River Systems Management Program
(WARSMP) of the Department of Interior and later by the Science and Technology office of Reclamation.
HDB is a project of the Bureau of Reclamation and various contractors, primarily the University of
Colorado's Center for Advanced Decision Support of Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) and Sutron
Corporation. In recent years, the development of HDB has centered on the Database of Record (DBOR), while building on previous efforts.
What types of data are stored in HDB?
HDB time-series data typically include reservoir elevations, contents and releases;
river and canal stages and flows; precipitation, snowpack and other weather information;
water quality and groundwater level information. Currently there are over 600 unique data types defined within HDB.
What are some of the advantages of HDB?
At the core of HDB is an Oracle database; a suite of applications has been developed
both within and around HDB. This structure allows offices the opportunity to both reuse current
applications, and to develop new applications to fit their unique needs. A wide variety of development
possibilities exist within HDB because an industry standard database is used. HDB significantly
improves each office's ability to perform efficient water operations and data analysis, reporting,
and research. The Database of Record also significantly improves Reclamation's legal defense of contentious water management decisions.
Explain more about the Database of Record concept.
Reclamation managers and staff are often interrogated both formally and informally regarding the
basis for operational decisions. These decisions are generally based on available water supply
and downstream demands. It is imperative to be able to document the basis for these decisions,
reproduce the overall state of the system, and retrieve what forecast information and other
associated raw data were available at the time the decisions were made.
The DBOR will enable the user to track back to the source data for calculated or summarized
data at any time interval, and provides historical information about what other versions of
the data existed, and when.. The DBOR also includes the basic calculation and validation
functionalities currently available in other hydrologic data management systems.
The Database of Record functional requirements are broken down into five basic components
-validation, retrieval, derivation, calculation, and archiving. The validation component
performs quality checks on the incoming and calculated data. The retrieval component provides
the ability to view stored observations, and archived versions of them. The derivation component
generates time-aggregated summary data from observed data. The calculation component creates new
calculated data from existing observed data. Finally, the archiving component logs the history of
the stored data and any subsequent modifications of that data.
How can I get started with HDB?
Contact the HDB team in the Contact Us page. HDB is owned by Reclamation and there
is no license fee for installation. Oracle version 10 or higher database software
is required and support is available on both Solaris and Linux operating systems.