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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 165–177Cite as

Array Databases

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Synonyms

Raster databases

Definition

Array (also called raster or grid): a collection of data items sharing the same data type where each item has a coordinate associated which sits at grid points in a rectangular, axis-parallel subset of the Euclidean space Zd for some d > 0 (same as arrays in programming languages).

Array database system: a database system with modeling and query support for multidimensional arrays.

Array query language: a query language allowing declarative retrieval on multidimensional arrays.

Historical Background

Traditionally, all data not tractable with relational tables have been considered “unstructured”; this has long included multidimensional (“n-D”) arrays although these have a very regular structure. Arrays form an important, widespread information structure appearing in virtually all domains and effectively make up for a large part of today’s “Big Data” as spatiotemporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data in science, engineering, business,...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

    Peter Baumann

Authors
  1. Peter Baumann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Baumann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. San Diego Supercomputer Center, Univ. of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Amarnath Gupta

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Baumann, P. (2018). Array Databases. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_2061

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