Sciql, a Query Language for Science Applications
SciQL, A Query Language for Science Applications M. Kersten, N. Nes, Y. Zhang, M. Ivanova CWI, Netherlands ABSTRACT technology has long been recognized [6, 34, 15, 18, 9, 20, 16, 4, Scientific applications are still poorly served by contemporary re- 31]. In particular, an efficient implementation of array and time lational database systems. At best, the system provides a bridge series concepts is missing [15, 34, 24, 1]. The main problems en- towards an external library using user-defined functions, explicit countered with relational systems in science can be summed up as import/export facilities or linked-in Java/C# interpreters. Time has (a) the impedance mismatch between query language and array ma- come to rectify this with SciQL1, a SQL-query language for science nipulation, (b) SQL is verbose for simple array expressions, (c) AR- applications with arrays as first class citizens. It provides a seam- RAYs are not first class citizens, (d) ingestion of Tera-bytes data is less symbiosis of array-, set-, and sequence- interpretation using too slow. The traditional DBMS simply carries too much overhead. a clear separation of the mathematical object from its underlying Moreover, much of the science processing involves use of standard storage representation. libraries, e.g., Linpack, and statistics tools, e.g., R. Their interac- The language extends value-based grouping in SQL with struc- tion with a database is often confined to a simplified import/export tural grouping, i.e., fixed-sized and unbounded groups based on dataset facility. A workflow management system is indispensable explicit relationships between its index attributes.
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