pyfdb 5.21.4.22

Python interface to FDB

[!IMPORTANT] This software is Emerging and subject to ECMWF's guidelines on Software Maturity.

PyFDB

PyFDB is the Python interface to the FDB, a domain‑specific object store designed to efficiently archive, index, list, and retrieve GRIB fields produced by numerical weather prediction workflows. It provides a thin, idiomatic Python layer over the FDB client library installed on your system, so you can drive FDB operations directly from Python scripts and notebooks.

The FDB itself is part of ECMWF’s high‑performance data infrastructure: it stores each GRIB message as a field, indexes it by meteorological metadata (e.g., parameter, level, date/time), and serves recent outputs to post‑processing tasks and users. In operational use, FDB acts as a hot cache in front of the long‑term MARS archive, enabling fast access to newly generated data.

If you’re new to FDB, you may want to skim the FDB documentation for concepts (keys, requests, schema, spaces) and the overall architecture before proceeding.

Installation via PyPI

Install the package from PyPI in your venv:

uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install pyfdb

This will bring in some necessary binary dependencies for you. Set the FDB_HOME environment variable accordingly:

export FDB_HOME=<path_to_fdb_home>

Documentation

For implementation details and tooling, see the FDB project pages.

To build the latest documentation locally, follow the guide at FDB.

License