[fitsbits] Maximum number of extensions

[Clive Page]

In article <bacti6$cnhg$1 at rook.le.ac.uk>,
Richard West <rgw at astro.le.ac.uk> wrote:

>You might very well think so, however a naive solution to my problem would
>yield of order 10^8 individual files, each of which would be updated once a
>day. Some initial tests suggest that the file system becomes a major
>bottle-neck if used in this way (ie. it would take ~3 days just to open and
>close the files!).

If you always update a FITS file so the new data always overwrite the old
data exactly in-place that's fine, but should you ever need to extend an
HDU which is not the last, the overhead of pushing all subsequent HDUs
down one block might be rather expensive, especially if there could be
10^8 of them.  

>So I'm considering some (hopefully) less naive solutions :-)

It sounds to me like you need a DBMS.  But I guess you know this already.

-- 
Clive Page   cgp <at sign> le.ac.uk