Camelot is a database system designed for output from the climate model run by the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. It contains metadata for climate model output held in a tape archive and on the workstation system used for analysis. The system is required because of the large and rapidly growing volume of archive data and the great variety of uses of the climate model. Camelot enables the user to find out about what has been archived and to retrieve data selectively to the workstations with specifications given in terms of metadata rather than files, without recopying data already held online. The PV-WAVE analysis environment used on the workstation system also allows the user to access the data by reference to its metadata.