# Data accessibility through file system access

**URL:** <https://forum.tiledb.com/t/data-accessibility-through-file-system-access/296>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [January 21, 2021, 2:59pm UTC](https://forum.tiledb.com/t/data-accessibility-through-file-system-access/296 "2021-01-21T14:59:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![kcandrews](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/8dc957/32.png) [@kcandrews](https://forum.tiledb.com/u/kcandrews)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2021, 2:59pm UTC](https://forum.tiledb.com/t/data-accessibility-through-file-system-access/296/1 "2021-01-21T14:59:06Z")

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`tiledb` looks extremely appealing to me except for one glaring issue: people have to learn a relatively complex system to get at their data. That to me represents an unacceptably high barrier to entry and a red flag risk that the data might become hard to recover in the future. I am wondering if there are any plans for functionality where a tiledb file could be mounted in `/etc/fstab` or with FUSE so that the data could be made accessible as directories of read-only delimited text files and/or some other standard human readable serialization format with wide parsing support across software platforms?

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**Author:** ![ihnorton](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/forum.tiledb.com/ihnorton/32/23_2.png) [@ihnorton](https://forum.tiledb.com/u/ihnorton)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 8:04pm UTC](https://forum.tiledb.com/t/data-accessibility-through-file-system-access/296/2 "2021-01-25T20:04:32Z")

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Hi Kyle,

Thanks for the comment. We aim to make TileDB accessible to a wide range of users and use-cases by building integrations with as many languages and libraries as possible. The postcard version of using TileDB from Python is as simple as `pip install tiledb` and then:

```auto
import tiledb, numpy as np

a = np.array(...)
tiledb.from_numpy("/path/array.tiledb", a)

with tiledb.open("/path/array.tiledb") as T:
   print( T[:] ) # read and print the array

```

Using TileDB from R looks very similar. From there, moving data to the cloud can be done with a change of target URL, for example `/path/array.tiledb` → `s3://my-bucket/my-array` to write to AWS S3 (we also support Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage natively).

We also integrate with domain-specific tools like [PDAL](https://docs.tiledb.com/geospatial/pdal) and [GDAL](https://docs.tiledb.com/geospatial/gdal), as well systems like [Spark](https://docs.tiledb.com/spark/) and [MariaDB](https://docs.tiledb.com/mariadb/), and [many more](https://docs.tiledb.com/main/solutions/integrations).

Regarding data longevity, there are a few steps we’ve taken to address this:  
(1) the TileDB Embedded library is open source under the MIT License, as are all of the language integrations.  
(2) the TileDB format is versioned, and we publish a format specification here: [TileDB/format\_spec at dev · TileDB-Inc/TileDB · GitHub](https://github.com/TileDB-Inc/TileDB/tree/dev/format_spec)  
(3) starting from [TileDB 1.4](https://github.com/TileDB-Inc/TileDB/releases/tag/1.4.0) we maintain tested backward compatibility for reading (we test reading of arrays written with all previous versions before release).

I suspect a FUSE\<\>txt interface is unlikely in the near future, but we do have many additional integrations as well as improvements to the TileDB CLI tooling in our roadmap.

Best,  
Isaiah