Abstract. Traditional relational databases have not always been well matched to the needs of data-intensive sciences, and to the needs of high energy physics data stores in particular. To address this mismatch, members of the database community and people involved with large scientific data stores in a variety of disciplines have inaugurated an open-source project, SciDB, that aims to develop and deliver database technologies suited to the needs of dataintensive sciences. This paper describes early experience using the first release of SciDB with an initial subset of high energy physics data structures and query patterns. It examines the early capabilities of SciDB, and describes requirements that further development must address if emerging database technologies such as SciDB are to accommodate the data structures, query patterns, computations, and use cases of high energy physics.