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Data Access IDL offers flexible and efficient built-in support for a wide range of data sources, file formats, data types and sizes. IDL supports 12-basic data types ranging from byte to string to double precision complex. From the very start, IDL was designed to handle large, multi-dimensional data. Variables in IDL can be scalars, arrays of up to eight dimensions, aggregate structures, pointers and objects. IDL supports accessing files larger than the 2GB limit on platforms that support large file systems. Data in IDL are not forced to the highest possible precision, as in some high level languages. Byte data remain 8-bit data and are not converted unnecessarily to 64-bit double precision. Your datasets never take up more memory than you need them to. In fact, variables in IDL are dynamically typed, so they can change from one precision to another, as needed. This keeps processing in IDL nimble. Data access in IDL is flexible, with built-in support for a wide variety of common file formats, ranging from TIFF and JPEG to DICOM and DXF. IDL supports hierarchical scientific data formats including HDF, HDF-EOS and netCDF. You'll find that it's also easy to read and write data stored in custom binary and ASCII formats. IDL also reads from TCP/IP sockets to import remote data directly via protocols such as HTTP and FTP. To read from and write to any ODBC compliant databases such as Oracle or Sybase, check out the Dataminer option. To see a complete list of the formats and data types for which IDL has built-in support, see the IDL Functional Summary.