  This paper outlines certain scenarios from the fields of astrophysics and
fluid dynamics simulations which require high performance data warehouses that
support array data type. A common feature of all these use cases is that
subsetting and preprocessing the data on the server side (as far as possible
inside the database server process) is necessary to avoid the client-server
overhead and to minimize IO utilization. Analyzing and summarizing the
requirements of the various fields help software engineers to come up with a
comprehensive design of an array extension to relational database systems that
covers a wide range of scientific applications. We also present a working
implementation of an array data type for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to support
large-scale scientific applications. We introduce the design of the array type,
results from a performance evaluation, and discuss the lessons learned from
this implementation. The library can be downloaded from our website at
http://voservices.net/sqlarray/
