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Announcing PyTables 2.4.0
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We are happy to announce PyTables 2.4.0.

This is an incremental release which includes many changes to prepare for
future Python 3 support.

What's new

This release includes support for the float16 data type and read-only support
for variable length string attributes.

The handling of HDF5 errors has been improved. The user will no longer see
HDF5 error stacks dumped to the console. All HDF5 error messages are trapped
and attached to a proper Python exception.

Now PyTables only supports HDF5 v1.8.4+. All the code has been updated to
the new HDF5 API. Supporting only HDF5 1.8 series is beneficial for future
development.

Documentation has been improved.

As always, a large amount of bugs have been addressed and squashed as well.

In case you want to know more in detail what has changed in this
version, please refer to:
http://pytables.github.com/release_notes.html

You can download a source package with generated PDF and HTML docs, as
well as binaries for Windows, from:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytables/files/pytables/2.4.0

For an online version of the manual, visit:
http://pytables.github.com/usersguide/index.html

What it is?

PyTables is a library for managing hierarchical datasets and
designed to efficiently cope with extremely large amounts of data with
support for full 64-bit file addressing. PyTables runs on top of
the HDF5 library and NumPy package for achieving maximum throughput and
convenient use. PyTables includes OPSI, a new indexing technology,
allowing to perform data lookups in tables exceeding 10 gigarows
(10**10 rows) in less than a tenth of a second.

Resources

About PyTables: http://www.pytables.org

About the HDF5 library: http://hdfgroup.org/HDF5/

About NumPy: http://numpy.scipy.org/

Acknowledgments

Thanks to many users who provided feature improvements, patches, bug
reports, support and suggestions. See the ``THANKS`` file in the
distribution package for a (incomplete) list of contributors. Most
specially, a lot of kudos go to the HDF5 and NumPy (and numarray!)
makers. Without them, PyTables simply would not exist.

Share your experience

Let us know of any bugs, suggestions, gripes, kudos, etc. you may
have.

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**Enjoy data!**

-- The PyTables Team