SciDB has extensive documentation but there is no official tutorial or getting started guide. In this post, we go over some of the tutorials and getting started materials available online.

Please note that some of the materials listed here are more than two years old and specific functions or commands might have been deprecated and replaced in newer versions of SciDB. One example is the count operator which was deprecated in version 13.12 and removed in version 14.3. Now, aggregate(..., count(...)) is used. We decided to still include old materials for the educational value they provide.

SciDB

• Demo Video: What’s New in SciDB 15.12 , Alex Poliakov, ~8min, April 2016
• SciDB Tutorial, Alex Poliakov and Paul G. Brown, October 2013
  • Slides: PPT, PDF
  • Video: SciDB Tutorial at XLDB 2013, ~3hours. Below are links to different sections of the tutorial within the video:
    • Introductory Demo: MODIS Regridding
    • The case for SciDB
    • Configuring and Installing SciDB, SciDB-R and Shim
    • Loading Data (TCGA LAML Methylation)
    • The Multidimensional Array Data Model
    • Redimensioning MODIS Data, Calculating Chunk Sizes
    • Non-integer Dimensions and Synthetic Dimensions on Trade Data
    • Query Structure, Operators
    • Filtering Operators: project, filter, between, slice, subarray
    • Apply and Aggregates: Grand, Grouped, Windows
    • Binary Operators: join, merge, cross, cross_join
    • Scalapack Math: gemm, gesvd
    • Canceling Queries
    • Adding Data to Existing Arrays: store and insert
    • PCA Example: LAML Methylation
    • Revisiting the MODIS Demo
    • User-Defined Objects, Overloading R Syntax with SciDB Queries
• Data Loading Tutorial, Paul G. Brown, March 2015
  • Slides: Load Binary Data into SciDB
  • Example: A (Non-definitive) Guide to Data Loading in SciDB

SciDB and R

Paradigm4 provides a SciDB package for R. The package can be found on GitHub. Below are some demo and tutorial videos on how to use this package:

• Demo Video: Interactive Data Exploration with SciDB, Alex Poliakov, ~8min, March 2015
  A Shinyapp visualization using 1000 Genomes data.
• Tutorial Video: Querying and Visualizing SciDB data with R, Bryan Lewis, ~3min, January 2013
  Bryan Lewis shows how to query SciDB data with R data.frame iterators and visualize it with R graphics tools.
• Tutorial Video: An Innovative Integration of R and SciDB, Bryan Lewis, ~3min, January 2013
  Link up the ease-of-use of R with seamlessly integrated data management and a massively scalable math library to build solutions that scale from prototype to production without rewriting any code.

SciDB and Python

Paradigm4 also provides a SciDB package for Python. The package can be found on GitHub as well. Below are some tutorial videos on how to use this package:

• Tutorial Video: Timeseries Data in SciDB, Bryan Lewis and Jake Vanderplas, ~28min, February 2015
  We’ll demonstrate working with timeseries data in SciDB and present basic examples that illustrate SciDB’s native analytics capabilities including aggregation and data decimation, regression and generalized linear models, covariance matrices, singular value decomposition, and extending SciDB with custom operations. The examples apply to a broad range of applications including quantitative finance, econometrics, and risk and credit analysis.
• Tutorial Video: Using SciDB from Python, Bryan Lewis, Travis Oliphant, and Jake Vanderplas, ~56min, July 2013

Various other demo and overview videos are available on the Paradigm4 YouTube channel.