[SciPy-user] HDF5 vs FITS (was: Fast saving/loading of huge matrices)

[James Turner]

 > As a side note, we do use this richness of hdf5 in our experiment, to
 > store say the time of an experimental run, the temperature of the room...

It sounds like HDF5 provides much the same capabilities as FITS, the
main file standard used for some decades in astronomy. It also sounds
like there may be a lot of overlap between Pytables and STScI's binary
tables, as implemented in PyFITS. I imagine that's why Pytables was
based on numarray, come to think of it... Does anyone have a good
overview of how they compare, or know whether this HDF format is the
same one that was used years ago by the Starlink project in the UK?

Now that Python + NumPy is gaining popularity in astronomy, I suppose
there will be more motivation/opportunity to use the tools that other
scientists are using (although I don't believe there is any immediate
prospect of replacing FITS with another format). I hope this doesn't
lead to too much incompatibility :-(. Anyway, these tools seem useful
to have around!

Cheers,

James.