Guided Research Final Report State of the art: Arrays in Databases

Database support for multidimensional raster data is a challenging, yet relatively unexplored field in databases. However, array data representation in databases is a highly necessary and important feature. Some of the most important applications are image, sensor, statistical and spatiotemporal databases. Although some research worldwide is being conducted in this field, it is still the application domains (ex. geo, life sciences) where interesting work is being done. Hence, the purpose of this research work was to do a literature survey of the state of the art in the field arrays in databases and present the most relevant technology and findings in this area. In order to have a comprehensive and organized literature on the subject, the publications found were organized in a tree like structure based on the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) classification scheme. The scheme had to be remodeled to better fit our narrower topic. At the end of this paper an evaluation of the state of the art will be presented