MeshSQL: the query language for simulation mesh data
Mesh data has been a common form of data produced and searched in scientific simulations, and has been growing rapidly in the size thanks to the increasing computing power. Today, there are visualization tools that assist scientists to explore and examine the data, but their query capabilities are limited to a small set of fixed visualization operations, which is far too short to meet the needs of most users. Thus, it is imperative to provide ad hoc query tools for them. In this paper, we propose an ad hoc query language MeshSQL, which has been extended from ANSI SQL99 to support the features unique to simulation mesh data, such as temporality, spatial regions, statistics, and similarity. After classifying MeshSQL queries based on three criteria related to efficient implementations of the queries, we present the syntax and semantics of MeshSQL, and support them with examples. We also discuss implementing MeshSQL queries in SQL99 in an object-relational database system that allows incorporating user-defined types and functions. To our knowledge, MeshSQL is the first and the only query language for simulation mesh data.
query language simulation mesh data sql99