Array DBMS in environmental science: Satellite sea surface height data in the cloud

Nowadays environmental science experiences tremendous growth of raster data: N-dimensional (N-d) arrays coming mainly from numeric simulation and Earth remote sensing. An array DBMS is a tool to streamline raster data processing. However, raster data are usually stored in files, not in databases. Moreover, numerous command line tools exist for processing raster files. This paper describes a distributed array DBMS under development that partially delegates raster data processing to such tools. Our DBMS offers a new N-d array data model to abstract from the files and the tools and processes data in a distributed fashion directly in their native file formats. As a case study, popular satellite altimetry data were used for the experiments carried out on 8- and 16-nodes clusters in Microsoft Azure Cloud. New array DBMS is up to 70× faster than SciDB which is the only freely available distributed array DBMS to date.