Blog CSD System

Organometallic chemistry is a broad research area and searching for relevant structures in a database like the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) can be a challenge. Here we show tips for searching for common types of organometallic complexes in the CSD.

In the 2021.3 release, we launched four new subsets: Electron Diffraction, Polymorphs, Hydrates, and High Pressure. We're also updating the navigation and API access to all CSD Subsets. In this blog, we look at real-world use cases for the new CSD Subsets and tips for making the most of the new functionalities.

If you have a CSD licence you can find out more about it in a few ways - and our new online licence portal has made it easier than ever.

We’re pleased to present a new structural analysis tool in our latest release: Hydrogen Bond Statistics. Used in combination with the other solid form risk assessment tools in CSD-Materials, this allows you to understand how different characteristics influence stability in your solid-state material. Here we explain how Hydrogen Bond Statistics works.

Announcing a modern, highly flexible licensing system 

The current licensing system for the CSD has served us well for over 20 years, but it is finally starting to show its age. It ties us in to a yearly release cycle and limits the components that we may individually licence. It comes from a time before virtual machines existed and is not fully compatible with the world of computers that we now live in. As such we are excited to announce a long overdue licensing system upgrade will be rolled out as part of our 2020.0 CSD release this December.

This release marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). We have just completed a multi-year software development project to replace the search engine at the heart of our well-known search program ConQuest. This not only brings into alignment the search functionality behind ConQuest, Mercury, WebCSD and the CSD Python API, but it enables much more flexible, dynamic and advanced searching of the CSD in the future.

We have now reached our third software and data update of 2018 as part of our push towards more frequent releases and we are now beginning to hit our stride. Many of the internal systems we have for software releases have now been significantly improved and streamlined due to this approach and we are able to get new developments and improvements out to users much more quickly than ever before. This release includes more significant work on the underlying technology within the CSD system, but we have also been able to include some improvements elsewhere within the CSD software.

We announced in February a substantial change to our software release pattern with a target of four software releases during 2018, rather than the usual single release around November time. This shorter development and release cycle allows us to be more responsive to user feedback as well as helping to ensure a continuously improving and stable software system. This current update is our second software release of the year (2018 CSD Release Update 2) with two more planned in the second half of 2018.

2018 marks the beginning of a shift in the release pattern for the CSD System – we are starting to provide our user community with the option to install smaller software updates more frequently. This approach to software development has been shown very clearly over the years to result in a better overall product for users. 

We launched the latest version of our CSD web searching interface, WebCSD v2, during the summer of 2017. Since then, we’ve also added a range of new features to the interface including the ability to perform unit cell searches, structural similarity searches and included query highlighting. We’re keen to get further feedback from you, our user community, about the interface and how you think it should be developed in the future.