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[[Category: Arrays]]

[[Sparse array]]s are [[array]]s in which a large number of cells are empty,  i.e. contain 0 or [[Null]].

Analytica uses a compact and efficient internal representation for [[sparse array]]s and for arrays with many repeated values, so that they do not consume a lot of memory. If an array is a copy or a part of another array, the arrays may share the [[slice]]s they have in common, which can also save memory.

Analytica’s internal representation of arrays is able to accommodate certain forms of sparseness, such as shared subarrays and constant subvectors. When such patterns of sparseness occur within array <code>A</code>, the [[CompressMemoryUsedBy]] function can be used to condense the internal representation to leverage the sparseness of <code>A</code>.  For more details on that, see [[CompressMemoryUsedBy]].

==See Also==
* [[Array]]
* [[CompressMemoryUsedBy]]
* [[MdArrayToTable]]
* [[Memory usage and management]]
* [[Performance Profiler library]]