Evaluation of HDF5

Main HDF Group page http://www.hdfgroup.org/

Supported Libraries

Python libraries

http://code.google.com/p/h5py/ http://www.pytables.org/moin

Java libraries

http://www.ral.ucar.edu/~steves/nujan.html https://wiki-bsse.ethz.ch/display/JHDF5

Matlab

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/hdf5.html

R bindings

https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/h5r/

.NET

http://www.hdfgroup.org/projects/hdf.net/

Advantages of using HDF5

• Compact binary data storage, extensible metadata
• Fast random and parallel access, efficient, scalable
• Widely used in High Performance Computing
• Open source and cross-platform
• HDF5-Fast Query and paper

Possible limitations of HDF5

• Difficulty to store variable-length string properties.
• Deleting a dataset does not free the space on disk. Requires rewriting the file.
• Many read/write operations on the same HDF5 file might be limited.
• Delete or update a dataset in HDF5?
• Evaluating HDF5: What limitations/features does HDF5 provide for modelling data?