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Re: hdf5


From: Steven G. Johnson
Subject: Re: hdf5
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 02:18:36 -0400

>I have tons of matrices I want to store and retrieve from
>the 'database'. Is hdf5 the right thing or can it conly be
>used for simple loading and saving data in a sequential way?

HDF5 is certainly not limited to loading and saving data in a sequential
way.  It supports essentially random read/write access, including efficient
support for reading/writing subsets (hyperslabs) of a large matrix.  (In
many ways, HDF5 is like a mini-filesystem.)  Not that you would want to
replace a[x][y][z] with a single-element HDF5 read inside a critical loop.

On the other hand, it is not the same as a real database if you want to do
queries across millions of little objects, have fine-grained transaction
atomicity, etcetera.  I personally don't have any experience in using HDF5
for anything approaching that (it's not what it is designed for).

If you want more details, a better place to ask is the HDF5 developers (who
provide lots of documentation, and source code too)
(http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu).

Cordially,
Steven G. Johnson

PS. Someone also mentioned Octave's native file format.  This is
essentially just a straight binary dump of the data.  That has the
advantage of being fast...to read and write *everything*.  Even random
reads are not possible (although a random-access directory could easily be
compiled if necessary), but random writes are even more difficult (e.g. if
some object is deleted or changes size).

PPS. Of course, the current Octave interface for writing HDF5 only supports
writing the whole file, not appending to or changing a few matrices in an
existing file...although this could be trivially changed, e.g. adding a
"-a" flag.  Also, the way the Octave load function works (it assumes
stream-based, non-random-access files), it actually reads every variable in
the entire file and throws away the variables it doesn't want.  Again, this
could be easily changed if desired for HDF5 loading since the format/API
support random access.




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