Silent value assignment failure in open_zarr Dataset due to hidden mode='r'

[jkmacc-LANL]

Hello Xarray devs,

Thanks for your work on this fantastic package. I'm a new user, and the subtleties of different data stores are unfamiliar to me. I got tripped up by the fact that Zarr stores are (silently) read-only, and I think it would be helpful if this were more prominent in the docstring or zarr section of the docs.

When I try to assign values to parts of a local Zarr-backed Dataset, I get a silent failure:

In [142]: ds = xr.open_zarr('tmp.zarr', chunks=None)

In [143]: selector = dict(time='2014-06-06T01:00:00', azimuth=0, frequency=0.0)

In [144]: ds['counts'].loc[selector].values
Out[144]: array(4294967295, dtype=uint32)

# try to assign a value here, like the example in the docs: 
# In [55]: ds['empty'].loc[dict(lon=260, lat=30)] = 100
In [145]: ds['counts'].loc[selector].values = 0

# just get the same value back
In [146]: ds['counts'].loc[selector].values
Out[146]: array(4294967295, dtype=uint32)

The answer seems to be buried in the open_zarr source code:

    ...
    # Zarr supports a wide range of access modes, but for now xarray either
    # reads or writes from a store, never both. For open_zarr, we only read
    mode = 'r'
    zarr_store = ZarrStore.open_group(store, mode=mode,
                                      synchronizer=synchronizer,
                                      group=group, consolidated=consolidated)
    ...

Expected Output

Assignment that follows the examples in the documentation.

1. I think that mentioning mode='r' in the open_zarr docstring would be the most helpful.
2. A description of this and the reasoning behind why zarr datasets are read-only would be helpful in the zarr section of the docs.
3. Optionally, a note in the indexing and assignment that not all store backends support assignment would also be helpful.

I'm happy to make a PR on 1 & 3, but I'm not familiar with the reasoning behind why stores are never mixed-mode.

Thanks again!

Output of xr.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS ------------------ commit: None python: 3.7.3 | packaged by conda-forge | (default, Mar 27 2019, 15:43:19) [Clang 4.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_401/final)] python-bits: 64 OS: Darwin OS-release: 16.7.0 machine: x86_64 processor: i386 byteorder: little LC_ALL: None LANG: en_US.UTF-8 LOCALE: en_US.UTF-8 libhdf5: None libnetcdf: None

xarray: 0.12.3
pandas: 0.24.2
numpy: 1.16.3
scipy: 1.3.0
netCDF4: None
pydap: None
h5netcdf: None
h5py: None
Nio: None
zarr: 2.3.1
cftime: None
nc_time_axis: None
PseudoNetCDF: None
rasterio: None
cfgrib: None
iris: None
bottleneck: None
dask: 1.2.2
distributed: 1.28.1
matplotlib: 3.1.0
cartopy: None
seaborn: None
numbagg: None
setuptools: 41.0.1
pip: 19.1
conda: None
pytest: None
IPython: 7.5.0
sphinx: None

[jhamman]

Hi @jkmacc-LANL - sorry this never got a response. Assuming you found a solution in the 5 years since the original post, I'll just remind future readers that all Xarray backends are read-only. Xarray doesn't support in-place editing as the OP was assuming.