  Astrophysics has become a domain extremely rich of scientific data. Data
mining tools are needed for information extraction from such large datasets.
This asks for an approach to data management emphasizing the efficiency and
simplicity of data access; efficiency is obtained using multidimensional access
methods and simplicity is achieved by properly handling metadata. Moreover,
clustering and classification techniques on large datasets pose additional
requirements in terms of computation and memory scalability and
interpretability of results. In this study we review some possible solutions.
