Why use SynDB?

SynDB serves three audiences: data owners who produce microscopy data, data scientists who analyze it, and institutions that want to participate in federated analysis without giving up control of their data.

Image data owner

• Data sharing: Others can use your data to teach, increasing the educational value of the data.
• Citations: Whenever your data is used in a publication, you will be cited, increasing your visibility in the scientific community.
• Provenance tracking: Version history, lineage, and auto-generated citations (BibTeX, RIS) for your datasets.

Data scientist

• Meta-analysis: Compare data across thousands of experiments using cross-dataset meta-analysis.
• SyQL queries: A declarative query language that resolves metadata into optimized SQL.
• Graph analysis: Network analysis on connectome data — motifs, shortest paths, reachability, cross-dataset comparison.
• Data visualization: Use the data to create visualizations for publications or presentations.
• Statistical modelling: Use the data to create models that can predict outcomes in future experiments.

Node operator / Institution

• Data sovereignty: Keep your data on your infrastructure — it never leaves your network.
• Federated meta-analysis: Participate in cross-institutional queries without transferring data.
• Minimal footprint: A federation node requires only ClickHouse and the syndb-node binary.
• Schema sync: The hub pushes DDL migrations to your node automatically.

See Federation Overview for setup details.