Many GRIB writers are not versioning their files in ways that allow generic readers to find the correct tables. Tales of mystery and mayhem.

The UCAR Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) has released version 1.4 of Nujan, a pure Java library for writing HDF5 and NetCDF4 files. Nujan is 100% open source and is released under the MIT license. Nujan is intended to be useful in situations where portability and a simplified development process are more important than access to the complete HDF5 feature set.

Indexes vs. indexes.  Gray's third requirement:

3. Intelligent indexes: for efficiently subsetting and filtering the data.

Gray's second desiderata gloria scientia: 

2. Schema language: powerful data definition tools allow one to specify the abstract data formats and to specify how the data is organized.

Talking about the first of Gray's criteria for scalable Scientific Data Management Systems:

1. Data independence: the physical data organization can change without breaking existing applications

How do we scale up to petabyte datasets? Lessons from the adult in the room, relational databases.

Indexed data access exposes the physical schema of datasets and makes violations of the relationship between coordinate and indices commonplace for datasets that change, such as aggregations of rolling archives. Making data requests in coordinate space will be added to the next generation of data access protocols, partly in order to solve this problem.