[fitsbits] Fastest way to read a binary table

[Steve Allen]

On Wed 2002-07-10T11:55:22 -0700, Steve Allen hath writ:
> 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?

Taking one step farther back ... the T in FITS is for Transport.

We can all applaud Bill Pence for the really cool features and high
efficiency that CFITSIO has achieved.  Nevertheless, at some point
there is a practical tradeoff where dealing with the data in a FITS
file is going to be less efficient than extracting it from FITS for
the duration of processing and then rewriting it as FITS after
processing.  I don't think it is yet reasonable to expect or even ask
CFITSIO to implement a fully-featured and highly efficient RDB.

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
PGP: 1024/E46978C5   F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E    49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93