Performance evaluation of multidimensional array storage techniques in databases

Storing multidimensional data in databases is an important topic both in the industrial and scientific database communities. Arrays are offered as a multidimensional data structure by most programming languages. Conventional database systems, however, do not support arrays of arbitrary dimensionality and base type. RasDaMan is a DBMS integrating arrays as a first class data type offering both a declarative query language and a specialised storage structure for arrays. The work presented evaluates the performance of queries on multidimensional array data stored in RasDaMan versus storage in a conventional RDBMS. In the relational system, the data is both mapped to relations and stored directly as binary data in BLOBs. The queries executed were modelled after queries common in scientific applications and decision support.