Open
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem?
Within pangeo-forge's internals we would like to call open_dataset
, then to_dict()
, and end up with a schema-like representation of the contents of the dataset. This works, but it also has the side-effect of loading all indexes into memory, even if we are loading the data values "lazily".
Describe the solution you'd like
@benbovy do you think it would be possible to (perhaps optionally) also avoid loading indexes upon opening a dataset, so that we actually don't load anything? The end result would act a bit like ncdump
does.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Otherwise we might have to try using xarray-schema or something but the suggestion here would be much neater and more flexible.