India, Dec. 15 -- 20 kmph! Now that can be the speed of a car (specially if it's driving in Bangalore or Mumbai). But 20kmph towards the Northside- that's more than speed. That's velocity.

Turns out one is a scalar data and the other is a vector data. And that's why pulling out and dishing out this data needs a different kind of database. It's a spaghetti plate situation. It needs a spork instead of a fork.

Your normal database works on rows and columns. This one works on vectors. Yeah, the same term we studied in the maths class: anything that has both magnitude and direction. A spreadsheet will tell you how to find a number- in which row or column. But that will not work for a vector- a list of numbers which indicates a location withi...