Does CDF support random file access?
Yes. One of the strengths of CDF is random file access and ability to specify the granularity of data read/write. Suppose you have a CDF file that has 1000 records in it. You can extract data by specifying: – the individual record number you want to extract data from OR – the start and end record number from which data is to be retrieved. You can also specify the record interval that defines the number of records to skip between successive reads. For example, if you specified 100, 200, and 2 for the start record number, the end record number, and the record interval respectively, the CDF system will start reading data from the record number 100 and read every other record (100, 102, 104, 106, and so on) until it reaches the record number 200. If a record is an array (contains more than one value), you can even specify which element(s) you want to extract for every record. The following methods in the Variable object class provide random file access for reading: getRecord, getScalarData
