Towards comprehensive database support for geoscientific raster data

Raster data in various dimensions form a geoscientific information category of ever growing importance. Hence, in future there will be an increasing need for versatile and fast networked database support for raster data. This need, however, is hardly satisfied by current DBMSs as they usually retract to blobs, i.e., encoded byte streams, which only allow for retrieval of large raster objects as a unit. The DBMS offers only very unsatisfactory quality of service and performance – all search and processing is burdened upon the database application. RasDaMan is a DBMS under development which aims at domainindependent, comprehensive database support for multidimensional discrete data (MDD), i.e., raster data of arbitrary size and dimension. In this contribution, we demonstrate applicability of RasDaMan to the geoscientific field, focusing on the respective extensions to standard SQL accomplishing flexible, formatindependent MDD retrieval and update.

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