design issue, large scientific data array

Hi, all:

I have a design issue need help. Suppose I have a database recording all the experimental data. The data is kind of n-dimensional data. for example of a two dimensional data (x,y) , for x=1 to 100000 and y will be y1, y2, .....yn ( n=100000). the size is not fixed. it could be between 10000 to 100000 We are not interesting in the detail relationship between i.e., The data array are marked as the Experimental ID--EID only. When we want fetch to the data by SQL, what we need is get the whole data of that EID. The data is like this
EID
X1 X2 X3 X4 .....Xn
Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 .....Yn

we could design a table as
EID
X
Y

and when the table is populated, it will be like this EID1
X1
Y1

EID1
X2
Y2
....

This is not efficient and when we try to get the data, it will be very slow. Remember this is
the simplest case of two dimensional. If it is 3, 4 dimensional, that will be very very slow.

Is there any way to design a table containing array member? Such as :

EID
X(array)
Y(array)

Or use block to store data. Then the question is when fetch the data by SQL, how to associate the
data block with the array, i.e. how to load the data block into the array.

Thanks

Chang Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 20:28:38 CDT