STIL - Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library
Version 4.3-6

Starlink User Note 252
Mark Taylor
14 May 2026

$Id: sun252.xml,v 1.384 2026/07/24 14:57:58 mbt Exp $

Contents

• Abstract
• 1 Introduction
• 1.1 What is a table?
• 2 The StarTable interface
• 2.1 Table Metadata
• 2.2 Column Metadata
• 2.3 Table Data
• 2.3.1 Sequential Access
• 2.3.2 Random Access
• 2.3.3 Parallel Processing
• 2.3.4 Adapting Sequential to Random Access
• 3 Table I/O
• 3.1 Extensible I/O framework
• 3.2 Generic Table Resource Input
• 3.3 Generic Table Streamed Input
• 3.4 Generic Table Output
• 3.5 Specifying I/O Handlers
• 3.6 Supplied Input Handlers
• 3.6.1 FITS
• 3.6.2 Column-oriented FITS
• 3.6.3 VOTable
• 3.6.4 ECSV
• 3.6.5 PDS4
• 3.6.6 Machine-Readable Table
• 3.6.7 Parquet
• 3.6.8 HAPI
• 3.6.9 CDF
• 3.6.10 Feather
• 3.6.11 ASCII
• 3.6.12 Comma-Separated Values
• 3.6.13 Tab-Separated Table
• 3.6.14 IPAC
• 3.6.15 GBIN
• 3.6.16 WDC
• 3.7 Supplied Output Handlers
• 3.7.1 FITS
• 3.7.2 VOTable
• 3.7.3 ECSV
• 3.7.4 Parquet
• 3.7.5 Feather
• 3.7.6 ASCII
• 3.7.7 Comma-Separated Values
• 3.7.8 Tab-Separated Table
• 3.7.9 IPAC
• 3.7.10 Plain Text
• 3.7.11 HTML
• 3.7.12 LaTeX
• 3.7.13 Mirage
• 3.8 Non-Standard FITS Conventions
• 3.8.1 FITS-plus
• 3.8.2 Wide FITS
• 3.9 Table Schemes
• 3.9.1 jdbc
• 3.9.2 loop
• 3.9.3 test
• 3.9.4 class
• 3.9.5 hapi
• 3.10 I/O using SQL databases
• 3.10.1 JDBC Configuration
• 3.10.2 Reading from a Database
• 3.10.3 Writing to a Database
• 3.11 Authentication
• 4 Storage Policies
• 4.1 Available Policies
• 4.2 Default Policy
• 5 GUI Support
• 5.1 Drag and Drop
• 5.2 Table Load Dialogues
• 5.3 Table Save Dialogues
• 6 Processing StarTables
• 6.1 Writable Table
• 6.2 Wrap It Up
• 6.3 Wrapper Classes
• 6.4 Examples
• 6.4.1 Sorted Table
• 6.4.2 Turn a set of arrays into a StarTable
• 6.4.3 Add a new column
• 7 VOTable Access
• 7.1 StarTable Representation of VOTables
• 7.1.1 Structure
• 7.1.2 Parameters
• 7.1.3 Column Metadata
• 7.1.4 Data Types
• 7.2 DATA Element Serialization Formats
• 7.3 Reading VOTables
• 7.3.1 Generic VOTable Read
• 7.3.2 Table-Aware DOM Processing
• 7.3.3 Table-Aware SAX Processing
• 7.3.4 Standards Conformance
• 7.4 Writing VOTables
• 7.4.1 Generic table output
• 7.4.2 Single VOTable output
• 7.4.3 TABLE element output
• 7.4.4 VOTable Version
• A System Properties
• A.1 java.io.tmpdir
• A.2 java.util.concurrent.ForkJoinPool.common.parallelism
• A.3 jdbc.drivers
• A.4 mark.workaround
• A.5 star.connectors
• A.6 startable.readers
• A.7 startable.schemes
• A.8 startable.storage
• A.9 startable.unmap
• A.10 startable.writers
• A.11 votable.namespacing
• A.12 votable.strict
• A.13 votable.version
• B Table Tools
• C Release Notes
• C.1 Acknowledgements
• C.2 Package Dependencies
• C.3 Version History