NASA Logo, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
SPDF

Speedups for reading CDF files in MATLAB

The current CDF read routine in MATLAB reads one record at a time instead of reading all the records at once. This problem was noted by Dr. Robert Weigel at George Mason University (GMU) and reported to the CDF office. The CDF office worked with Dr. Weigel and fixed the problem and sent the fixed code to MATLAB for inclsuion into a future MATLAB release. We were told by MATLAB that this fix were included in the 2008 MATLAB release. In the meantime, you can download the fix (posted by Dr. Weigel at MATLAB Central) here.

The patch reads all the records in one read, and it's significantly faster than the MATLAB's CDFREAD function.