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"HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) technologies are relevant when the data challenges being faced push the limits of what can be addressed by traditional database systems, XML documents, or in-house data formats. Leveraging the powerful HDF products and the expertise of The HDF Group, organizations realize substantial cost savings while solving challenges that seemed intractable using other data management technologies. Many HDF adopters have very large datasets, very fast access requirements, or very complex datasets. Others turn to HDF because it allows them to easily share data across a wide variety of computational platforms using applications written in different programming languages. Some use HDF to take advantage of the many open-source and commercial tools that understand HDF. Similar to XML documents, HDF files are self-describing and allow users to specify complex data relationships and dependencies. In contrast to XML documents, HDF files can contain binary data (in many representations) and allow direct access to parts of the file without first parsing the entire contents. HDF, not surprisingly, allows hierarchical data objects to be expressed in a very natural manner, in contrast to the tables of relational database. Whereas relational databases support tables, HDF supports n-dimensional datasets and each element in the dataset may itself be a complex object. Relational databases offer excellent support for queries based on field matching, but are not well-suited for sequentially processing all records in the database or for subsetting the data based on coordinate-style lookup."

"A new system that automatically streamlines database access patterns can make large Web applications up to three times as fast."