Interesting discussion evolving! Disclaimer: I am co-author of that paper as well. That said: you may call it "suspicious" if the authors come to that conclusi

Interesting discussion evolving! Disclaimer: I am co-author of that paper as well. That said: you may call it "suspicious" if the authors come to that conclusion, but on the same grounds it is likewise suspicious if the writer of a tool that has not excelled doubts the results :) Let us rather look at facts - the benchmark is published and open, and actually similar figures have been reported by other, completely independent benchmarks. The paper has undergone tough scrutiny by 5 independent experts in the field before publication. Doubting about the value of databases reminds me of the old times of COBOL vs SQL: "we don't need SQL data management". Incidentally, IT world since then has embraced databases of all kinds...and exactly arrays should be the big exception? That does not make sense. Tools will need to accept that there are other tools as well, and ideally discussion is merit-based. "everyone who works with big array datasets already knows Python"...well, if the only tool you know is a hammer then...ya know. There are so many more worlds than just your comfort zone, python! Just think of R, for example. PS: I am not questioning xarray - in projects we have used xarray as a frontend to rasdaman, and this combination works like a charm: python wrapper around scalability and federation, connected through the open OGC standards.