[odb-users] HDF5 support?

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Marcus,

Daniels, Marcus G <mdaniels at lanl.gov> writes:

> Besides the work, is there any reason not to consider adding support
> for HDF5?

I looked a bit into it, and it appears that HDF5 is more of a file
format rather than a (relational) database. While right now ODB is
exclusively about relational databases, the idea of also supporting
file formats (XML, JSON, etc) seems like a natural extension and
crossed our minds on several occasions. I think HDF5 will fit into
this model (i.e., file format vs database) quite well.


> While Postgres has array types, HDF5 is designed for parallel computing
> environments where datasets of terabytes in size are read and written
> in native format in parallel. (I don't see existing RDBMs competing in
> this arena.)

I wonder how will this parallelism fit into ODB? I don't believe HDF5
has a notion of transactions. How does HDF5 ensure ACID of the data?

Boris