matlab support

[RaananHadar]

Hi,
Very excited about the future of TileDB.
Any plans on supporting matlab in the future? Its still popular choice for numerical computing.

[stavrospapadopoulos]

Definitely in our roadmap :)! Please tell us more about your data interests and typical workflows.

[RaananHadar]

Thank you. I'll hop in via slack.

[spinicist]

Hello - I have a project (https://github.com/spinicist/riesling) that currently uses HDF5 that I'd be interested in migrating to TileDB. However I have a number of users (scientists) who use Matlab to write their data out to HDF5 to be read by my code. Is there any update of when there might be a Matlab interface to TileDB?

[OgreTransporter]

That's an interesting idea. Matlab is a very powerful tool.

But I personally would rather put the work into a Python support. With Python you can now also do almost everything Matlab can do and a lot of scientists now use Python. And unlike Matlab, it doesn't cost a fortune. In addition, there is much more help for Python on the web than for Matlab.

[RaananHadar]

Guys, I completely agree that python is a viable alternative to matlab. The realities of software developments are that many teams may decide to use python for new projects, they will have a matlab tail they have to drag into projects when it comes to legacy code that is expensive to convert. Chances are that it also contains mex's and 3rd party pcode which can make this super difficult.

I have seen a matlab + python project where a python script copies all the data from storage to disk before calling matlab. This is super bad and should not be the case if tiledb wants to succeed.

[OgreTransporter]

I agree with this! Calling Matlab from Python is a disaster! Especially because the Python interface of Matlab varies between versions.

[spinicist]

@OgreTransporter TileDB already has a Python interface - https://github.com/TileDB-Inc/TileDB-Py

What is being requested here is a clean Matlab -> TileDB interface as well. Nothing to do with Python.