Dealing with Large Dataset Queries in the Virtual Solar Observatory

The Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) project presents a solution for dealing with large dataset queries. One of the main problems arising from the VSO user community has been managing queries that generate a large amount of metadata records spanning several providers. Until now the only way to do this was through painstakingly repeating the same query for smaller time periods and collecting the information at each pass. With the solution presented here we are making possible for users to access data over any arbitrary time period in one single query, minimizing the metadata generated, and yet allowing the user to sample either a small subset or the whole.