Two questions about NetCDF

• To: netcdfgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Two questions about NetCDF
• From: Gerhard Eckel <Gerhard.Eckel@xxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 4 Jan 1995 22:56:36 +0100

I posted this already to sci.data.formats:

Hello NetCDF users and developpers,

We are in the process of evaluating netCDF. Our institute is
specialized in musical applications and our main usage of netCDF would
be storage and retreival of sound signal analysis data and sound
synthesis control data. We are currently using home-brew formats.
Compared to our own formats we found two problems with netCDF:

1) We used to pass data over UNIX pipes from one program to another to
avoid writing intermediate data files. As far as we can see up to now
netCDF doesn't support this type of data exchange (stream oriented
rather than file oriented).  What are the reasons for this apparent
limitation? Will there be extensions of netCDF which will allow for
this feature? Could we add this extension ourselves and make it
available to UNIDATA such that it will be supported in the future?

2) We use variable record sizes for many of our analyses data. A
maximum record size is hard to estimate before the analysis is started
and the record size cannot be changed efficiently during the analysis
process. A maximum record size can also waste much disk space. Do other
people have this problem with netCDF? Are there work-arounds?

For the rest, we are very pleased with netCDF. It would fully suit our
needs given that we can find satifying answers to the two questions we
ran into.

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Gerhard Eckel
IRCAM, Centre Georges Pompidou
1, place Igor Stravinksy
F-75004 Paris / France
eckel@xxxxxxxx