Large-scale scientific experiments or simulation programs often generate large amounts of multidimensional data. Data volume
may reach hundreds of terabytes (up to petabytes). In the present and the near future, the only practicable way for storing
such large volumes of multidimensional data are tertiary storage systems. But commercial (multidimensional) database systems
are optimized for performance with primary and secondary memory access. So tertiary storage memory is only in an insufficient
way supported for storing or retrieval of multidimensional array data. To combine the advantages of both techniques, storing
large amounts of data on tertiary storage media and optimizing data access for retrieval with multidimensional database management
systems is the intention of this paper. We introduce concepts for efficient hierarchical storage support and management for
large-scale multidimensional array database management systems and their integration into the commercial array database management
system RasDaMan.
This work was supported by the ESTEDI project (http://www.estedi.org). ESTEDI (European Spatio-Temporal Data Infrastructure
for High-Performance Computing) is funded by the European Commission under FP5 grant no. IST-1999-11009.