In 1989, Peter Baumann started a research on database support for images, then at Fraunhofer Computer Graphics Institute.

At TU Munich, in the EU funded basic research project RasDaMan, a first prototype was established, on top of the O2 object-oriented DBMS, and tested in Earth and Life science applications.

For historical reasons, tables are called collections, as initial design emphasized an embedding into the object-oriented database standard, ODMG.

Anticipating a full integration with SQL, rasdaman collections represent a binary relation with the first attribute being an object identifier and the second being the array.

The rasql query guide[8] provides details, here some examples may illustrate its use: Note: this is a very naive phrasing of vegetation search; in practice one would use the NDVI formula, use null values for cloud masking, and several more techniques.

This leads to an architecture scalable to data volumes exceeding server main memory by orders of magnitude.

Embeddings into C++ and Java APIs allow invocation of queries, as well as client-side convenience functions for array handling.

Arrays per se are delivered in the main memory format of the client language and processor architecture, ready for further processing.

A Java servlet, petascope, running as a rasdaman client offers Web service interfaces specifically for geo data access, processing and filtering.

Today, rasdaman is a fully-fledged implementation offering select / insert / update / delete array query functionality.

The difference between both variants mainly consists of performance boosters (such as specific optimization techniques) intended to support particularly large databases, user numbers, and complex queries; Details are available on the rasdaman community website.

Being the first Array DBMS shipped (first prototype available in 1996), rasdaman has shaped this recent database research domain.

In 2016, INSPIRE (Legal Framework for Spatial Information in Europe [20]) adopted WCPS as optional component of INSPIRE-WCS.