Its simplicity makes it is easy to understand, but limitations include:

• No real data structures, just multidimensional arrays and lists
• No nested structures or ragged arrays
• Only one shared unlimited dimension for efficiently appending new data
• A flat name space for dimensions and variables
• Character arrays rather than strings
• A small set of numeric types

In addition, the classic netCDF format imposes some performance limitations for high performance computing applications or with very large datasets:

• Constraints on sizes of large variables
• No compression, just packing
• Only ASCII characters in names
• Changes to a file schema (the logical structure of the file) may be very inefficient
• Efficient access sometimes requires data to be read in the same order as it was written
• Big-endian bias may hamper performance on little-endian platforms

2007 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > The "Classic" NetCDF Data Model