Dear MonetDB support, My name is Jiri Nadvornik and I am working for Czech astronomical institute (http://www.asu.cas.cz/en/about/about-the-institute). For more than a year I’m trying to generate identifiers for astronomical objects used when creating light curves for these objects. In general, I’m working with spherical coordinates and based on Euclidean parameters (and possibly other parameters, like magnitude) I am clustering these objects to assign multiple observations to one real object. A bottleneck when doing this in a relational database (like PostgreSQL) is not the finding of the neighbors as such (~ ms in a loop), but the inefficiency of working with disk IO when doing so. So after a little analysis of what could be done, I am quite interested into storing the data (mainly spherical coordinates) in an array DB, physically partition regions of the sky to multiple disks and then use the clustering on these partitions in parallel. My question no. 1 for you is whether MonetDB has some kind of support for spherical indexing (PgSphere, Q3C, HealPix, …) to ingest and correctly distribute the astronomical data. I need to control the way of how the data will be distributed to physical partitions. If question no.1 can be somehow answered as true, then question no 2. is: What is the easiest way to install MonetDB, ingest my data and test them? P.S.: Our processed dataset contains now cca 3e8 observations (entries for clustering) which resolve to about 6e6 real objects. We expect that number to double when we process all of our data. Thank you for your answer. Kind regards, Jiri Nadvornik Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic nadvornik.ji@gmail.com