POOL Development Status and Plans

The LCG POOL project [1] is now entering the third year of active development. The basic functionality of the project has been provided but some functional extensions will move into the POOL system this year. This paper summarizes the main functionality provided by POOL, which is used in physics productions today. It also presents the design and implementation of the main new interfaces and components planned such as the POOL RDBMS abstraction layer and the RDBMS based Storage Manager back-end..