# Introduction to SciDB arrays¶

SciDB arrays are composed of cells. Each cell may contain one or more values referred to as attributes. The data types and number of attributes are consistent across all cells within one array. All the attribute values within a cell may be left undefined, in which case the cell is called empty. Arrays with empty cells are referred to as sparse arrays in the SciDB documentation.

Individual attribute values may also be explicitly marked missing with one of several possible SciDB null codes.

Cells are arranged by an integer coordinate system into n-dimensional arrays. SciDB uses signed 64-bit integers for coordinates. Each coordinate axis is typically referred to as a dimension in the SciDB documentation. SciDB is limited in theory to about 100 dimensions, but in practice that limit is typically much lower (up to say, 10 dimensions or so). While the default SciDB array origin is usually zero, SciDB arrays may use any signed 64-bit integer origin.

SciDBArray objects are Python representations of SciDB arrays that mimic numpy arrays in many ways. SciDBArray array objects are limited to the following SciDB array attribute data types: bool, float32, float64, int8, int16, int32, int64, uint8, unit16, uint32, uint64, characters, and strings.

In order to use SciDB, Python needs an interface to a SciDB server. This is accomlished through the connect() function.

connect takes an optional URL specifying the location of the SciDB coordinator node (running Shim; see Installing SciDB-Py). If no URL is provided, it looks for a SCIDB_URL environment variable, and then defaults to http://localhost:8080.

The following snippet imports SciDB-Py and establishes a connection with the database – adjust the host name as required if SciDB is on a different computer:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> from scidbpy import connect
>>> sdb = connect('http://localhost:8080')


Throughout this documentation, the sdb variable is used to refer to the connection to a SciDB instance, as above.

# Authenticated and Encrypted Connections¶

Shim supports two modes of user authentication (PAM and Digest Authentication) and one form of encryption (SSL over HTTPS – see the Shim API documentation page for more details). The connect() function will apply sensible defaults if you provide a username and password:

• Digest Authentication is used if the host URL begins with http://
• PAM authentication and SSL are used if the host URL begins with https://

Under normal circumnstances you shouldn’t need to worry about the details of authentication. However, note that the sdb object returned form connect includes login() and logout() methods for manually managing PAM-authenticated sessions (Digest authentication is applied for every request, and doesn’t require a separate login step).