Hi Eyal, 

Sorry for the late reply. Yes, there is no problem with large number of columns in sparse representation of arrays (i.e., dimension, dimension, value).
However, in order to perform relational operations, this structure should be pivoted first. When matrices are represented by tables, both algebras can be applied to the same object, 
so I'm specifically looking for the main bottleneck of processing hundreds of thousands of columns in MonetDB.

Best regards, 
Oksana


On Wed, 10 Oct 2018 at 13:40, Eyal Rozenberg <E.Rozenberg@cwi.nl> wrote:
If you want to model an NxM matrix of elements of type MYTYPE in a DBMS
(not just MonetDB), you would typically have a table with 3 columns:

CREATE TABLE my_matrix (
        "row"          INTEGER  NOT NULL,
        "col"          INTEGER  NOT NULL,
        "cell_value"   MYTYPE   NOT NULL,
        PRIMARY KEY ("row", "col")
);

of length N x M.

Anyways, I'm not the expert on Arrays in our group so I'll let others
chime in.

Eyal


On 10/10/2018 13:01, Oxana Dolmatova wrote:
> Hello, 
>
> Thank you for all the replies and information!
> The version is 11.23, plus I'm using the cloud platform with 4cpu-16ram-hpc.
> The number of rows was just 1K for 15K attributes in a table. 
> I understand that MonetDB was made with no intention to create and
> process tables with that many columns. But I'm interested in matrix
> operations integration, so I would like to know what is the main
> bottleneck to process such data (matrix-like sized) in the system. 
>
> Best regards, 
> Oksana
>
>
> On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 at 21:02, Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz@technion.ac.il
> <mailto:eyalroz@technion.ac.il>> wrote:
>
>     I'll add two observations to what Zhang Ying said.
>
>     1. Internally in MonetDB, the index of a column (or a BAT) in MonetDB's
>     BBP (BAT Buffer Pool) is a signed 32-bit integer (on most platforms), so
>     there isn't a theoretical problem having more than 15,000 columns; but
>     MonetDB was not designed with that many tables in mind. The "long
>     dimension" is expected to be the length of columns.
>
>     2. When you have as many as 15,000 columns, you're not simply finding
>     more attributes of the same items. So, for example, a person has a first
>     name, last name, year of birth, etc. etc. - but after several dozens of
>     these you're probably adding columns such as "data relevant to this
>     person at point X", "data relevant to this person at point Y" and so on.
>
>     In your case, I'm guessing you have a lot of points and hence a lot of
>     columns with data for your different items. What you should consider
>     doing instead is having an extra "coordinate" column. Thus, in the
>     example I gave, I would drop most of the columns, in favor of a second
>     table named "person_data". This table's columns would be "person_id" (or
>     some other key columns), "sample_point" and "value". Thus instead of M
>     columns and N records you would have N x M records with 3 columns.
>
>     Eyal
>
>
>
>     On 09/10/2018 16:50, Ying Zhang wrote:
>     > Hai Oksana,
>     >
>     > A.f.a.I.k., there is no explicit limit on the #columns you can put
>     in a relation (did you mean “table”?).  The reason that mserver5
>     stopped responding is probably because it is busy with I/O.
>     >
>     > A long time ago, I once tried to create 1M tables, each with 3
>     columns.  After about a day or something, MonetDB has created ~400K
>     tables, and I could hear my HDD being constantly busy.  MonetDB was
>     still working, but that was already a sufficient evidence that that
>     idea wasn’t going to work.
>     >
>     > So the question is actually what do you want to achieve?
>     >
>     > Regards,
>     > Jennie
>     >
>     >
>     >> On 9 Oct 2018, at 13:43, Oxana Dolmatova
>     <oxana.dolmatova@gmail.com <mailto:oxana.dolmatova@gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >>
>     >> Hello,
>     >>
>     >> Could you tell the limitation for number of columns in a relation
>     and the main reason for that limitation. So far I could create
>     relations with up to 15000 columns. When the number of columns is
>     bigger mserver5 stops responding.
>     >> 
>     >> Thank you and best regards,
>     >> Oksana Dolmatova
>     >> _______________________________________________
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>     >
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>     >
>
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Oksana Dolmatova
>
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--
Best regards,
Oksana Dolmatova