Groups

Groups allow organizing arrays into logical hierarchies. This is especially useful for object stores that might not have the concept of a directory.

A group organizes arrays, other groups, or any other TileDB solution asset, into hierarchies similar to what you experience with traditional file managers. However, TileDB groups can do this organization logically. Groups differ from traditional file managers in two ways:

1. The physical location of any array, group, or other TileDB asset may be different from the logical location of the asset inside a TileDB group.
2. The same asset (with the same physical location) may belong to more than one group.

This provides a lot of flexibility in dynamically grouping various assets, especially on (cloud) object storage, without physically copying or moving enormous quantities of data from one physical path to another.

Each group is physically stored as a collection of folders and files, similar to arrays. Visit the Storage Format Spec for more details on the actual group storage format. Moreover, you can apply access policies on a group on TileDB Cloud, similar to arrays and other assets, which enables for flexible organization and governance of all your data in one place.