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by siddboots 4734 days ago
Not sure if I completely understand what you mean, but the benefit of a sparse matrix is that zero-valued elements are made implicit by the absence of that (row, column) relation in the database. The drawback is that you need to store a (row, column) for every non-zero-value.

It would be wasteful to use this approach for non-sparse matrices, but it would still "work".