# Reducing precision

**URL:** <https://forum.tiledb.com/t/reducing-precision/137>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [January 20, 2020, 5:56pm UTC](https://forum.tiledb.com/t/reducing-precision/137 "2020-01-20T17:56:48Z")\
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**Author:** ![jsheedy](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/user_avatar/forum.tiledb.com/jsheedy/32/55_2.png) [@jsheedy](https://forum.tiledb.com/u/jsheedy)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 5:56pm UTC](https://forum.tiledb.com/t/reducing-precision/137/1 "2020-01-20T17:56:48Z")

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I’m evaluating TileDB for storage of dense 3D model output arrays. Only 16 bit precision is required and by converting our float64 input data to int16 we get much better compression ratios and the on disk size of the TileDB ends of being ~15% of original.

The [builtin scaling of xarray/netCDF](http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/io.html#scaling-and-type-conversions) handles this precision reduction well but I don’t see anything similar in TileDB.

Is there a way to have TileDB handle this, or is there a good pattern for storing the scale factor in metadata? Right now I’m doing the transformation at the edge of read/write to TileDB.

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