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Pythonic way to access HDF5 data structures similar to pointers

I've a project that is utilizing HDF5. There are file structures as well as HDF5 data structures for each dataset.
Think of a large video. Each frame is divided up equally and written to multiple files as well as multiple HDF5 data chunks. A single 'video' may have 20+ files (representing temporal and slices), and then more files to represent additional slices. The datasets aren't very large- under 30gb- but are still cumbersome.
My initial dive to associate (stitch) the pieces back together was to put together an array of pointers to the individual frames, and then stack them for the temporal aspect of the video. This would be (fairly) small since I would be pointing to the locations on disk where everything was. This would also limit the amount of data I'd have to hold into memory- always a bonus- for when I scale to the 'larger' datasets.
However the way to accomplish this in Python eludes me- especially when considering I want to tie in the metadata for each frame (pixels, their locations, etc).
Is there a method I should be following to better reference the data and 'stitch' it back together? My current method was to create numpy arrays of the raw data. This has the detriment of reading all of the data in and storing it in memory (and disk).

how can I save super large array into many small files?

In linux 64bit environment, I have very big float64 array (single one will be 500GB to 1TB). I would like to access these arrays in numpy with uniform way: a[x:y]. So I do not want to access the array as segments file by file. Is there any tools that I can create memmap over many different files? Can hdf5 or pytables store a single CArray into many small files? Maybe something similar to the fileInput? Or Can I do something with the file system to simulate a single file?
In matlab I've been using H5P.set_external to do this. Then I can create a raw dataset and access it as a big raw file. But I do not know if I can create numpy.ndarray over these dataset in python. Or can I spread a single dataset over many small hdf5 files?
and unfortunately the H5P.set_chunk does not work with H5P.set_external, because set_external only work with continuous data type not chunked data type.
some related topics:
Chain datasets from multiple HDF5 files/datasets

I would use hdf5. In h5py, you can specify a chunk size which makes retrieving small pieces of the array efficient:
http://docs.h5py.org/en/latest/high/dataset.html?#chunked-storage

You can use dask. dask arrays allow you to create an object that behaves like a single big numpy array but represents the data stored in many small HDF5 files. dask will take care of figuring out how any operations you carry out relate to the underlying on-disk data for you.

HDF5 Links to Events in Dataset

I'm trying to use HDF5 to store time-series EEG data. These files can be quite large and consist of many channels, and I like the features of the HDF5 file format (lazy I/O, dynamic compression, mpi, etc).
One common thing to do with EEG data is to mark sections of data as 'interesting'. I'm struggling with a good way to store these marks in the file. I see soft/hard links supported for linking the same dataset to other groups, etc -- but I do not see any way to link to sections of the dataset.
For example, let's assume I have a dataset called EEG containing sleep data. Let's say I run an algorithm that takes a while to process the data and generates indices corresponding to periods of REM sleep. What is the best way to store these index ranges in an HDF5 file?
The best I can think of right now is to create a dataset with three columns -- the first column is a string and contains a label for the event ("REM1"), and the second/third column contains the start/end index respectively. The only reason I don't like this solution is because HDF5 datasets are pretty set in size -- if I decide later that a period of REM sleep was mis-identified and I need to add/remove that event, the dataset size would need to change (and deleting the dataset/recreating it with a new size is suboptimal). Compound this by the fact that I may have MANY events (imagine marking eyeblink events), this becomes more of a problem.
I'm more curious to find out if there's functionality in the HDF5 file that I'm just not aware of, because this seems like a pretty common thing that one would want to do.

I think what you want is a Region Reference — essentially, a way to store a reference to a slice of your data. In h5py, you create them with the regionref property and numpy slicing syntax, so if you have a dataset called ds and your start and end indexes of your REM period, you can do:
rem_ref = ds.regionref[start:end]
ds.attrs['REM1'] = rem_ref
ds[ds.attrs['REM1']] # Will be a 1-d set of values
You can store regionrefs pretty naturally — they can be attributes on a dataset, objects in a group, or you can create a regionref-type dataset and store them in there.
In your case, I might create a group ("REM_periods" or something) and store the references in there. Creating a "REM_periods" dataset and storing the regionrefs there is reasonable too, but you run into the whole "datasets tend not to be variable-length very well" thing.
Storing them as attrs on the dataset might be OK, too, but it'd get awkward if you wanted to have more than one event type.

How can I ensure unique rows in a large HDF5

I'm working on implementing a relatively large (5,000,000 and growing) set of time series data in an HDF5 table. I need a way to remove duplicates on it, on a daily basis, one 'run' per day. As my data retrieval process currently stands, it's far easier to write in the duplicates during the data retrieval process than ensure no dups go in.
What is the best way to remove dups from a pytable? All of my reading is pointing me towards importing the whole table into pandas, and getting a unique- valued data frame, and writing it back to disk by recreating the table with each data run. This seems counter to the point of pytables, though, and in time I don't know that the whole data set will efficiently fit into memory. I should add that it is two columns that define a unique record.
No reproducible code, but can anyone give me pytables data management advice?
Big thanks in advance...

See this releated question: finding a duplicate in a hdf5 pytable with 500e6 rows
Why do you say that this is 'counter to the point of pytables'? It is perfectly possible to store duplicates. The user is responsible for this.
You can also try this: merging two tables with millions of rows in python, where you use a merge function that is simply drop_duplicates().

Using Pandas to create, read, and update hdf5 file structure

We would like to be able to allow the HDF5 files themselves to define their columns, indexes, and column types instead of maintaining a separate file that defines structure of the HDF5 data.
How can I create an empty HDF5 file from Pandas with a specific table structure like:
Columns
id (Int)
name (Str)
update_date (datetime)
some_float (float)
Indexes
id
name
Once the HDF5 is created and saved to disk, how do I retrieve the column and index information without having to open the file completely each time since it will likely contain several GB of data.
Many thanks in advance...
-- UPDATE --
Thanks for the comments. To clarify a bit more:
We do have some experience with Pandas but by no means are really proficient. The part that is tripping us up is creating an empty data structure and reading that structure from a file that you will not want to fully open. In all of the Pandas examples there is data. The Pandas examples also only show two ways to retrieve data/structure which are to read the entire frame into memory or issue a where clause. In this case, we would like to be able to see the table structure without query operations if possible.
I know this is an odd case. Why the heck would you want an empty dataframe?? Well, we want to have a great deal of flexility in moving data around and want to be able to define a target dataframe structure prior to data writing, which could take place much later (e.g. hours or days). Since the HDF5 specification maintains all that information it seems directionally incorrect to store the table structure information separately. Thus our desire to crack the code on this subject.
-- UPDATE 2 --
To add more detail as #jeff requested.
We would like to abstract some of the common Pandas functions like summing data or merging two frames. Thus we would like to be able to ask each frame what their columns are so we can present a view for the user to select the result frame columns.
For example, if we imported a CSV with columns A, B, C, D, and V and saved the frame to HDF5 as my_csv.hdf then we would be able to determine the columns by opening the file.
However, in our use case it is likely that the import frame for the CSV could be cleared periodically and no longer contain the data. The reason knowing that the my_csv frame has certain columns and types is important because we want to enable a user to then select those columns for summing in a downstream operation. Lets say a user wants to sum column V by the values in columns A and B only and save the frame as my_sum. Since we can't ensure my_csv will always have data we would like to ensure it at least contains the structure.
Open to other suggestions obviously. It is also possible to store the table structure info in the user_block. This, again, is not ideal because the structure is now being kept in two different areas but I guess it would be possible to always update the user_block on save using the latest column and index information for the frame, although I believe the to_* operations in Pandas will blow away the user_block so...blah. I feel like I'm talking myself into maintaining a peer structure definition but I REALLY would love some suggestions to not have to do that.