The original thread asking about an array of complex numbers has been marked as "solved." The requester has decided to serialize the complex numbers and store them in a blob. Earlier, Keith had suggested storing complex numbers as a pair of real numbers and a separate box table. I extended Keith's suggestion with two or three tables, elements, arrays and optionally coordinates.
There is some literature on storing arrays in SQL databases. In addition complex numbers seem to be the orphan stepchild of programming languages (let alone databases). Although FORTRAN IV had complex numbers they were not added to the C standard until C99. Language / Standard / Library ---------------------------------------- C / C99/ complex.h http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/C_Reference/complex.h C# / 4.0 / System.Numerics.Complex https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.numerics.complex(v=vs.110).aspx Java /?/ Apache Commons Python/2.6.5/ cmath https://docs.python.org/2/library/cmath.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_data_type So, I suppose if a company wanted to sponsor it, complex numbers could be supported through an addin library similar to FTS3 and FTS4 for full text searches. http://sqlite.org/fts3.html Here for example, is a discussion on IBM DeveloperWorks concerning the Informix database. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gbowerman/entry/sql_and_the_complex_plane?lang=en Some databases have Abstract Defined Type (Oracle) or User Defined Types (Microsoft SQL Server) that could be used for complex numbers. Ironically, the scientific data format NetCDF did not have provision for complex numbers (it was designed for weather data). https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/archives/netcdfgroup/2011/msg00027.html There are some discusssions of scientific versions of SQL (such as SciQL): "A Query Language for Multidimensional Arrays: Design, Implementation, and Optimization Techniques" http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/libkin/papers/sigmod96a.pdf "Requirements for Science Data Bases and SciDB" http://www-db.cs.wisc.edu/cidr/cidr2009/Paper_26.pdf "SciQL, A Query Language for Science Applications" http://homepages.cwi.nl/~zhang/papers/arraydb11.pdf Jim
