Treffer: Geo/Environmental and Medical Data Management in the RasDaMan System

Multidimensional discrete data (MDD) -- i.e., arrays of arbitrary size, dimension, and base type -- appear in a variety of business, technical, and scientific application fields. RasDaMan is an effort to give comprehensive domain-independent MDD database support. Based on a formal algebraic array model, RasDaMan offers declarative array operators embedded in standard SQL; key DBMS components are an MDD query optimizer and a streamlined storage manager for efficient access to subsets of huge arrays. We present the RasDaMan approach to MDD management based on the medical and geographic application fields addressed in the project. 1 Introduction In principle, any natural phenomenon becomes spatiotemporal raster data of some specific dimensionality once it is sampled and quantised for storage and manipulation in a computer system; moreover, a variety of artificial sources such as simulators, image renderers, and business data analyzers produce raster data. The management problems posed b.