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Better documentation of behaviour with irregular source chunks

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#33 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Start by reviewing the behavior of Rechunk and ConsolidateChunks with irregular source chunk sizes, including the leap-year example in the issue. Determine whether the limitation is fundamental and what guidance, such as preprocessing with SplitChunks, should be documented; done means the limitation and recommendations are clearly explained.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hiya!

In some source datasets the original chunks have irregular sizes. For example one netcdf file per year, where some years are leap years hence shorter than others.

Although the data model would seem to support this in principle, I couldn't get Rechunk or ConsolidateChunks to work without regular source chunk sizes.

Is this a fundamental limitation or something that could be in scope to address? And do you have any recommendations for getting data like this into regular chunks? In the leap year case, first splitting the source chunks into one chunk per day using SplitChunks could be an option. Although in general this would require splitting into chunks of gcd(*all_possible_source_chunk_sizes) which could be too small.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
170
Forks
15
Avg merge
18h 27m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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