Reading and Perspectives: netCDF and Databases

I've been referred to a lot of indie web blogs of late, and it's paying off quite nicely for me Here's the latest example.

Simon Willison--co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette--has a blog that led me to Maggie Appleton's site. Once there, I found a very nice, and very pretty primer on databases. Within the primer was a perspective I'd never seen before. There was an emphais, (certainly not the only emphasis, but an emphasis nonetheless), placed on columns, like so:

from "A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases"

I, frankly, had never considered coluimns in any way except, as 'fields' that contributed to rows, and that could have conditions placed on them. A column as a whole entity unto itself? I'd never considered such a thing.

A few days later though, while studying the netCDF format used by COSMIC2 missions among projects, I suddenly needed that column perspective, and I had it! netCDF files from COSMIC2 are very much arranged as coluimns. There's a dictionary entry for longitudes and a completely different dictionary entry for lattitudes. The entire dataset was built out of columns that, at the time of this writing, are assembled with each other merely by making them adjacent, and then accessing whatever data one needs by a pseudo-row index across the columns of interest.

So, reading little independent blogs made thinking about my new-ish project simple rather than the larger mental leap it would have been if I'd made the undertaking from a clean slate. Kinda cool!

It also led to an interesting though. Should there be a netCDF-extract plugin for datasette?

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