NeXus efficiency

[Przemek Klosowski]

Chris Moreton-Smith wrote:

   For my money I would go straight for Vdatas because it immediately removes the 
   two possible ways of storing heterogeneous structured information (in 
   attributes and in vgroups) from our implementation if not the interface.  It 
   also gives a closer basis to the relational database model as Vdatas are 
   analagous to relational database tables.

The fundamental requirement is that we have a data container that can
take an n-dimensional data array and a bunch of number/string
attributes, including perhaps the dimension axis. The main argument
against Vdata was that it didn't allow one to store attributes,
because all columns in a Vdata have to be the same length. 

Shimin Xu mentioned that they were planning to allow adding attributes
to Vdatas; I still don't see how it could be done in HDF 4.1---does
anyone know what am I missing? BTW. if attributes were there, we could
sort-of have dimension axis (an attribute called axis, with a value
of  a dimension axis vector), although this won't be recognized by
generic browsers.

		przemek
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