Defaults for bcolz operation

You can tailor the behaviour of bcolz by changing the values of certain some special top level variables whose defaults are listed here. You can change these values in two ways:

  • In your program: the changes will be temporary. For example:

    bcolz.defaults.out_flavor = "numpy"
    
  • Manually modify the defaults.py module of the bcolz package: the changes will be persistent. For example, replace:

    defaults.out_flavor = "bcolz"
    

    by:

    defaults.out_flavor = "numpy"
    

Generally, only the former is needed.

Defaults in contexts

bcolz allows to set short-lived defaults in contexts. For example:

with bcolz.defaults_ctx(vm="python", cparams=bcolz.cparams(clevel=0)):
   cout = bcolz.eval("(x + 1) < 0")

means that the bcolz.eval operation will be made using a “python” virtual machine and no compression for the cout output.

List of default values

out_flavor

The flavor for the output object in eval() and others that call this indirectly. It can be ‘bcolz’ or ‘numpy’. Default is ‘bcolz’.

vm

The virtual machine to be used in computations (via eval()). It can be ‘python’, ‘numexpr’ or ‘dask’. Default is ‘numexpr’, if installed. If not, ‘dask’ is used, if installed. And if neither of these are installed, then the ‘python’ interpreter is used (via numpy).

cparams

The defaults for parameters used in compression (dict). The default is {‘clevel’: 5, ‘shuffle’: True, ‘cname’: ‘lz4’, quantize: 0}.

See Also:
cparams.setdefaults()