MIQS: Metadata Indexing and Querying Service for Self-Describing File Formats

Scientific applications often store datasets in self-describing data file formats, such as HDF5 and netCDF. Regrettably, to efficiently search the metadata within these files remains challenging due to the sheer size of the datasets. Existing solutions extract the meta-data and store it in external database management systems (DBMS) to locate desired data. However, this practice introduces significant overhead and complexity in extraction and querying. In this research, we propose a novel Metadata Indexing and Querying Service (MIQS), which removes the external DBMS and utilizes in-memory index to achieve efficient metadata searching. MIQS follows the self-contained data management paradigm and provides portable and schema-free metadata indexing and querying functionalities for self-describing file formats. We have evaluated MIQS with the state-of-the-art MongoDB-based metadata indexing solution. MIQS achieved up to 99% time reduction in index construction and up to 172kx search performance improvement with up to 75% reduction in memory footprint.