BrowerUk> I'd store it as video. Bear with me.
First, a wonderfully whacked out suggestion. I wouldn't expect any less from you, BrowserUk, as you always come up with an intriguing possibility.

A few specific responses: First, a series of video frames is not that outlandish, actually. A video frame is nothing but a series of 2D images that flutter by our eyes at 30 fps. So, it is akin to storing a bunch of 2D images. Doing locational searches is, as you suggested, finding the correct file, and then finding the subset from that file.

But, these would be a lot of very large images... a pretty bad combination. My dataset's 2D dims are 4,587 X 2,889 = 13,251,843 points. 23 years is 23 * 365 (or 366) = 8395 (or 8418) images. Plus, each "pixel" in the image is an array of my 6 or 7 values. So, we are back to complexity in retrieval.

See my response to moritz at Re^2: Strategy for managing a very large database with Perl. What am I optimizing for?

I only care about how easily and quickly I can get data that I want. Say, I want to create an image of variable a over an area for a particular day. That is a simple db query SELECT var FROM table WHERE year = ? AND yday = ?. Note: A columnar database such as Vertica or MonetDB might be very speed efficient for these queries, but those db lack spatial searches, and suffer from the lack of ease aspect.

Nevertheless, your idea is very intriguing, and I am going to do a few tests with array storage. Of course, as mentioned in an earlier posting, the data are already in NetCDF, an array storage format, so I have to do something new that overcomes the shortcomings of the current format. The main shortcoming of the current format is the inability to do spatial searches for arbitrary spatial bounds.

Thanks again, for a wonderful response.

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to Re^2: Strategy for managing a very large database with Perl (Video) by punkish
in thread Strategy for managing a very large database with Perl by punkish

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.