Tablicious provides the table
class for representing tabular data.
A table
is an array object that represents a tabular data structure. It holds
multiple named “variables”, each of which is a column vector, or a 2-D matrix whose
rows are read as records.
A table
is composed of multiple “variables”, each with a name, which all have
the same number of rows. (A table
variable is like a “column” in SQL tables
or in R or Python/pandas dataframes. Whenever you read “variable” here, think
“column”.) Taken together, the i-th element or row of each variable compose
a single record or observation.
Tables are good ways of arranging data if you have data that would otherwise be stored
in a few separate variables which all need to be kept in the same shape and order,
especially if you might want to do element-wise comparisons involving two or more of
those variables. That’s basically all a table
is: it holds a collection of
variables, and makes sure they are all kept aligned and ordered in the same way.
Tables are a lot like SQL tables or result sets, and are based on the same relational
algebra theory that SQL is. Many common, even powerful, SQL operations can be done
in Octave using table
arrays. It’s like having your own in-memory SQL engine.