Introduction

bcolz at glance

bcolz provides columnar, chunked data containers that can be compressed either in-memory and on-disk. Column storage allows for efficiently querying tables, as well as for cheap column addition and removal. It is based on NumPy, and uses it as the standard data container to communicate with bcolz objects, but it also comes with support for import/export facilities to/from HDF5/PyTables tables and pandas dataframes.

The building blocks of bcolz objects are the so-called chunks that are bits of data compressed as a whole, but that can be (partially) decompressed in order to improve the fetching of small parts of the array. This chunked nature of the bcolz objects, together with a buffered I/O, makes appends very cheap and fetches reasonably fast (although the modification of values can be an expensive operation).

The compression/decompression process is carried out internally by Blosc, a high-performance compressor that is optimized for binary data. The fact that Blosc splits chunks internally in so-called blocks means that only the interesting part of the chunk will decompressed (typically in L1 or L2 caches). That ensures maximum performance for I/O operation (either on-disk or in memory).

bcolz can use numexpr or dask internally (numexpr is used by default if installed, then dask and if these are not found, then the pure Python interpreter) so as to accelerate many internal vector and query operations (although it can use pure NumPy for doing so too). numexpr can optimize memory (cache) usage and uses multithreading for doing the computations, so it is blazing fast. This, in combination with carray/ctable disk-based, compressed containers, can be used for performing out-of-core computations efficiently, but most importantly transparently.

carray and ctable objects

The main data container objects in the bcolz package are:

  • carray: container for homogeneous & heterogeneous (row-wise) data
  • ctable: container for heterogeneous (column-wise) data

carray is very similar to a NumPy ndarray in that it supports the same types and basic data access interface. The main difference between them is that a carray can keep data compressed (both in-memory and on-disk), allowing to deal with larger datasets with the same amount of memory/disk. And another important difference is the chunked nature of the carray that allows data to be appended much more efficiently.

On his hand, a ctable is also similar to a NumPy structured array that shares the same properties with its carray brother, namely, compression and chunking. Another difference is that data is stored in a column-wise order (and not on a row-wise, like the structured array), allowing for very cheap column handling. This is of paramount importance when you need to add and remove columns in wide (and possibly large) in-memory and on-disk tables –doing this with regular structured arrays in NumPy is exceedingly slow.

Furthermore, columnar means that the tabular datasets are stored column-wise order, and this turns out to offer better opportunities to improve compression ratio. This is because data tends to expose more similarity in elements that sit in the same column rather than those in the same row, so compressors generally do a much better job when data is aligned in such column-wise order.

bcolz main features

bcolz objects bring several advantages over plain NumPy objects:

  • Data is compressed: they take less storage space.
  • Efficient shrinks and appends: you can shrink or append more data at the end of the objects very efficiently (i.e. copies of the whole array are not needed).
  • Persistence comes seamlessly integrated, so you can work with on-disk arrays almost in the same way than with in-memory ones (bar some special attention to flush data being required).
  • ctable objects have the data arranged column-wise. This allows for much better performance when working with big tables, as well as for improving the compression ratio.
  • Can leverage Numexpr and Dask as virtual machines for fast operation with bcolz objects. Blosc ensures that the additional overhead of handling compressed data natively is very low.
  • Advanced query capabilities. The ability of a ctable object to iterate over the rows whose fields fulfill some conditions (and evaluated via numexpr, dask or pure python virtual machine) allows to perform queries very efficiently.

bcolz limitations

bcolz does not currently come with good support in the next areas:

  • Limited number of operations, at least when compared with NumPy. The supported operations are basically vectorized ones (i.e. those that are made element-by-element). But with is changing with the adoption of additional kernels like Dask (and more to come).
  • Limited broadcast support. For example, NumPy lets you operate seamlessly with arrays of different shape (as long as they are compatible), but you cannot do that with bcolz. The only object that can be broadcasted currently are scalars (e.g. bcolz.eval("x+3")).
  • Some methods (namely carray.where() and carray.wheretrue()) do not have support for multidimensional arrays.
  • Multidimensional ctable objects are not supported. However, as the columns of these objects can be fully multidimensional, this is not regarded as an important limitation.