A call to order

Abstract

Scientific applications are infrequent users of commercial database management systems. We feel that a key reason is they do not offer good support for ordered data structures, such as multidimensional arrays, that are needed for natural representation of many scientific data types. In this paper, we lay out issues in database support of ordered structures, consider possible approaches along with their advantages and shortcomings, and direct the reader to the wide variety of prior work outside the data management field that might be successfully applied in this endeavor.