Hi Justin,
> Would it be reasonable to create a "standard practise" of having a table
> (i.e. visad_structure) with the relationships and datatypes (etc) of
> all the other elements in it?
>
> From the point of view that creating this table and including the
> needed VisAD meta-data in it would let people plug in their JDBC driver,
> point it at the database, and then know all of these informational bits
> that are being mentioned here? i.e. Gridded vs Irregular topology info,
> etc.
>
> Maybe it wouldn't be that hard to discuss what would be a good meta-data
> layout needed for such a table so that things become as automatically
> configuring as possible?
All a general SQL interface can depend on is information
that will be present in every SQL database (i.e., the SQL
standard). Defining a auxiliary metadata table would only
work for those who set out to make their SQL data
VisAD-compatible. Our experience with other file and
server formats (VisAD has interfaces for over 20) is that
all they have to work with is information in the format
standard.
Cheers,
Bill
