| Re: scientific data format [message #14160 is a reply to message #13985] |
Tue, 26 January 1999 00:00   |
Liam Gumley
Messages: 473
Registered: November 1994
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Senior Member |
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raph@phy.ornl.gov wrote:
> Vincent Fournier-Sicre <vfs@acri.fr> wrote:
>> I am still undecided whether I should use NetCDF, CDF or
>> HDF format to store data. Could somebody tell me what the
>> pros/cons are for each one of these formats? Is there a
>> document available somewhere that compares those formats?
>> By advance thanks,
>> Vincent
>
> I asked the same question to the consultants at NERSC about 6 months
> ago. Their response was to go with HDF since it was a little better
> supported (both at NERSC and in general), a little faster evolving, and
> accessable by more tools (though there are a fair number of tools which
> can access netCDF and not HDF). There are in fact efforts under way to
> make HDF and netCDF interoperable, check out
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/faq.html#hdf
Faster evolution is not necessarily a good thing. For example, the
latest version of HDF (HDF5) is to my knowledge completely incompatible
with HDF4, and NCSA has no plans to include a backwards compatible API
(to read HDF4 and HDF3) in HDF5.
As an example, HDF files written with HDF3.3r1 (1993 vintage) that
contain SDS objects cannot be read correctly by HDF4.1r2 (the current
release). Thus I have HDF files that were created in 1993 which cannot
be read with the current version of HDF.
In contrast netCDF V3 is completely compatible with netCDF V2
(see http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/release-notes-3. 3.html)
The data model offered by netCDF is also much more straightforward than
the data model offered by HDF4 (I don't know about HDF5). This is a big
plus in my opinion, since it means the API is much simpler. Yet the
netCDF data model is flexible enough to allow users to be very creative
in how they structure datasets.
Anyway, I've used both netCDF and HDF since 1991, and my personal
preference is for netCDF.
Cheers,
Liam.
---
Liam E. Gumley
Space Science and Engineering Center, UW-Madison
1225 W. Dayton St., Madison WI 53706, USA
Phone (608) 265-5358, Fax (608) 262-5974
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/~gumley
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