Hierarchical Storage Support and Management for Large-Scale Multidimensional Array Database Management Systems

Large-scale scientific experiments or simulation programs often generate large amounts of multidimensional data. Data volume may reach hundreds of terabytes (up to petabytes). In the present and the near future, the only practicable way for storing such large volumes of multidimensional data are tertiary storage systems. But commercial (multidimensional) database systems are optimized for performance with primary and secondary memory access. So tertiary storage memory is only in an insufficient way supported for storing or retrieval of multidimensional array data. To combine the advantages of both techniques, storing large amounts of data on tertiary storage media and optimizing data access for retrieval with multidimensional database management systems is the intention of this paper. We introduce concepts for efficient hierarchical storage support and management for large-scale multidimensional array database management systems and their integration into the commercial array database management system RasDaMan.