Echoing my frustration... A few months ago I went through a similar search. IIRC my needs were: binary data storage (not ascii), index-based access on arrays wi

Echoing my frustration... A few months ago I went through a similar search. IIRC my needs were: binary data storage (not ascii), index-based access on arrays without loading the whole file in memory, being able to attach metadata with the file contents, with interfaces for multiple scientific programming languages (Python, Julia, etc). I recall going through ASDF, BSDF and a handful of other formats, finally ending up with HDFS -- which was okay, but not fully satisfactory (I don't recall all my gripes right now).