[AstroPy] A replacement for the FITS format.

[Demitri Muna]

Hi,

On Jul 22, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Erik Bray <embray at stsci.edu> wrote:

> I think that the last bullet point could use clarification.  The way I might 
> word this is that it should be possible to order table data in row-order or 
> column-order depending on how it is most likely to be accessed.  This is of 
> course a determination that would have to be made by the user, and sometimes 
> there is no right answer (but where there is a right answer it should be 
> possible to do).

Is this that important anymore? First, it's hard (if not sometimes impossible) so say whether a user will want to read a file by columns or rows. It depends on the use case. Second, if offsets to the start of each row were cached, I'd argue that with SSD (we're thinking of the future here) drives and proper random access to the file, reading a column with offsets shouldn't be too big of a speed hit.

The real problem is that FITS tables can have variable length rows. I think this is the real problem to address - not allowing that.

Cheers,
Demitri

_________________________________________
Demitri Muna

Department of Astronomy
Ohio State University

http://scicoder.org/




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