About
The Datacube Guide is an open resource for building and using multi-dimensional data products, in two parts:
- a catalog of worst practices — what not to do when producing and consuming datacubes.
- a guide to datacube visualization — how to render Zarr and other cloud-optimized datacubes dynamically on the web.
We hope this will grow into a community maintained commons.
Datacube production gotchas
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Tiny data chunks
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Massive data chunks
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Tiny coordinate chunks
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Dispersed metadata
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Non-standardized metadata
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Bloated datatypes
Datacube usage gotchas
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Default FSSpec Caching
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Default GDAL Config
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Default Xarray combine arguments
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Using old libraries
Datacube visualization
How to render Zarr and other cloud-optimized datacubes dynamically on the web — the rendering stack, server-side tilers, client-side libraries, and viewer applications.
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Start here: Overview
Concepts, the dynamic-visualization architecture, and a decision tree for choosing an approach.
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Dynamic tiling servers
Serving datacubes as tiles from a backend: TiTiler vs Xpublish compared.
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Client-side rendering
Browser libraries and viewers that read Zarr directly: deck.gl-raster, zarr-layer, zarr-cesium, Browzarr, GridLook.
Acknowledgements
The Datacube Guide was initiated in partnership with the Microsoft Planetary Computer team. We recommend checking out the wonderful work going on as part of the Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro service as well as the Open Planetary Computer Data Catalog. We greatly appreciate Microsoft's dedication to supporting open resources and building impactful geospatial services.
The latest updates to this guide were supported by NASA's Office of Data Science and Informatics (ODSI) as part of the Data Systems Evolution team. The Data Systems Evolution team at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Office of Data Science and Informatics enables scientific exploration and discovery through innovative data visualization techniques and analysis capabilities that lower the barrier to entry for cloud-hosted data.