> With a lot of weather data you end up with these large gridded files like grib, netcdf, hdf, etc. Does anyone know if theres a way to get this kind of data into a database or something where you can query it quickly? I've been wondering how people handle this kind of data for awhile.

GDAL has drivers for HDF4, HDF5, and netCDF.

I do a good amount of work with multispectral imagery data. My workflow for anything that doesn't immediately come as a geotiff or a jp2 is to either use gdal_translate via the command line to convert the datasets I'm interested in into a multi-band geotiff, or to open the product directly in either Python or Julia with the appropriate library.

That said, how much effort and what I do with the data depends a lot on where it comes from.