The dtool command line interface allows one to organise files into datasets and to move datasets between different storage solutions, for example from local disk to remote object storage. Importantly it also provides methods to verify that the transfer has been successful.

The Python API gives complete access to the data and metadata in a dataset. It makes it easy to create scripts for processing the items, or a subset of items, in a dataset. The Python API also allows datasets to be constructed programatically.