Oracle varray type mapping

KNIME Analytics Platform
#1

Dear all,

in our Oracle DB we have a column of type
varray (3800) of BINARY_FLOAT
which I would like to map to a KNIME collection type.

In Knime analytics platform 4.1.3 (also tried in the nightly 2.7.2020) I’m using the (non-legacy) DB Connector with a JDBC8-19 driver. In the input type mapping this column is shown as “array” and mapped to “string->string” which shoes me a hash, but not the data (which would be a float array).
I cannot find a mapping to a collection.

Is there a way to map this float array to a KNIME collection type? Or any other recommendation how to handle it?

Background:
These float array values represent a kind of compound descriptor which we would like to use to predict compound properties. So for each compound we would like to use this vector as input for a machine learning algorithm to train a model and do predicions.

@Jeany I guess this might be a common scenario how KNIME is used in Pharma and might help others as well, so any help here is highly appreciated!

Regards,
Manuel

#2

Hey Manuel,

Thanks for reaching out. The current database framework doesn’t currently support reading/writing arrays. If you want to work with them, you could try converting to a string, or breaking it up into multiple columns.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Regards,
Wali Khan

#3

Any plans to add support for DB arrays? It would be very welcomed. Multiple columns are not feasible with variable-length arrays, and conversion to a string results in a distorted implementation of the DB’s conceptual model that complicates later queries.

#4

Yes we plan to support DB arrays in the future.
Bye
Tobias

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