s, variable length strings are more
convenient as they are never too small hold a piece of information.
However, internally in HDF5, these aren’t stored in the dataset itself -
only a pointer to the HDF5-internal heap is stored. This has 2
implications:</p>
<ul>
<li>Retrieving the string is somewhat slower</li>
<li>As the heap is not compressed, compression of datasets does not
yield much space saving for variable length data</li>
</ul>
<p>From this perspective, fixed length strings are considerably bette