What are "synthetic dimensions" in Blaze?

Question

The Blaze readme (here https://github.com/ContinuumIO/blaze) describes a number of improvements over NumPy including "Synthetic Dimensions". I have searched around but have been unable to find out what they are.

Could someone enlighten me?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A couple of caveats first. One, I work on the project and second these features are still in the planning stage so they are not implemented at this moment.

That being said a "synthetic dimension" in Blaze is much like a derived column in database. It is a value calculated formulaically from an expression in terms of other rows or columns but does not exist in physical memory or on disk.

In Blaze we trying to make these kind of columns ( especially for columnar data stores ) be able to be consumed by next generation ufunc objects that are able to calculate values in the computation from the synthetic dimensions as well as physical dimensions.

Hope that answers the question!