[fitsbits] Fastest way to read a binary table

[Steve Allen]

On Wed 2002-07-10T14:26:02 -0400, William Pence hath writ:
>                                 This doesn't generally help when reading
> tables, however, because the elements in a column are usually not contiguous
> in the FITS file.

If I'm not mistaken the sorts of things that are being discussed with
FITS binary tables are using them in much the same fashion as a
relational database.  In our usage the FITS tables are used as a
transport mechanism for moving data in and out of RDBs.  We have lots
of tables with primary and foreign key relationships between their
fields.

The engineering tradeoffs involved in relational database performace
are very well studied.  For the purposes of building efficient
programming interfaces (and possibly even for building a RDB into the
back end of a FITS programming interface) would it be helpful if a
FITS binary table had a way to assert that it conformed exactly to
some subset of RDB behavior?

If such a hint existed then a programming interface might be able to
infer, or at least be told, whether it was worth the trouble of
reading the entire set of FITS tables into a RDB and then performing
subsequent operations via SQL queries.

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
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