Neha Patil (Editor)

SciDB

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Developer(s)
  
Paradigm4

License
  
AGPL v3

Initial release
  
2008

Website
  
www.paradigm4.com

Type
  
Database management system

SciDB is an array database designed for multidimensional data management and analytics common to scientific, geospatial, financial, and industrial applications. It is developed by Paradigm4, co-founded by Michael Stonebraker.

History and Characteristics

Michael Stonebraker co-created SciDB where, he claims, arrays are 100 or so times faster than a RDBMS on this class of problem. It is swapping rows and columns for mathematical arrays that put fewer restrictions on the data and can work in any number of dimensions unlike the conventionally widely used relational database management system model, in which each relation supports only one dimension of records.

According to a Strata Conference presentation on SciDB, it natively supports:

  • An array data model for efficient storage and manipulation of larger-than-memory multi-dimensional arrays.
  • Data versioning and provenance to allow tracking results back to original supporting data.
  • What-if modeling, back-testing, and re-analysis.
  • Massive scale math on the arrays for linear algebra and analytics.
  • Uncertainty can be modeled by associating error-bars with data.
  • Efficient storage.

    • References

    SciDB Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA