Yes. I had to save string data in a column, which is frankly not something you want to do. HDF5 is super weird about encodings, quietly introduces errors, requi

Yes. I had to save string data in a column, which is frankly not something you want to do. HDF5 is super weird about encodings, quietly introduces errors, requires a fixed character length for that column and if you want to quickly access or search through the data, you have to write a program because HDF5View (or whatever it was called) is the worst. And since you still have to manage multiple reads and writes, the only benefit is maybe speed. String data and HDF5 = No. It does have an index tho compared to Parquet, which is handy for ML type stuff.