pyTables is a great product. It is extreme fast and powerful; however the current stable release lacks of index support..
fortunately, since June 2011,,(the last month...yep) the situations has been changed: the creator left. and the team decided to build a new version based on pyTablesPro which has fully index support...
now the source code is available on github.
tonight i spent about one hour to figure out how to build the latest pytables on windows 7. Steps are shown as follow:
prerequisities:
1:need hdf5 binary release
2: need lzo binary release
you can find them on web...though you can build them for yourself, this step is entirely optional.
3: grab the source code of pytables from github..
4: if you suffer a problem about calling cython..you can do it manually...
compile all .pyx files in \tables by yourself. and then change the setup.py add a new clause after Line 457:
retcode = 0 to make sure the setup.py running smoothly...
run:
python setup.py --hdf5=xxxx --lzo=xxxx build
after a while..you may run a few tests inside the directory. now,,the index is available...
Note: create Index doesn't automatically let your query running faster....at least for my case..it is an another story...