Comment by laurencerowe
5 years ago
In the genomics world, Tabix indices enables similar use cases. An ordered TSV file is compressed in chunks (bgzip) and a Tabix index created to allow range based access by mapping from the index -> chunk. This allows a browser based genome browser zoomed into a section of the genome to fetch information from a multi gigabyte file.
now if only tabix and most hokey bioinformatics formats would die and just be replaced with a formal schema spec in SQLite...
Honestly I think Tabix's bgzipped TSV is one of the less hokey bioinformatics formats, at least compared to the various custom binary formats floating around.
For web browser based genome browsers I suspect this (very cool!) sqlite hack would require many more http requests.