Data Formats

• Avro
• Parquet
• Arrow
• ORC
• CSV
• JSON
• BSON
• CSON
• TOML
• XML
  • XML Lint
  • XML Starlet
• YAML
• HBase vs Parquet vs Avro

Avro

See the Avro doc page.

Parquet

See the Parquet doc page.

Arrow

• in-memory data format
• columnar
• vectorized operations - SIMD (Single Input Multiple Data)
• zero-copy reads, no serialization
• language support:
  • Java
  • C / C++
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Javascript
  • Golang (contributed by InfluxDB)
• de-facto in-memory analytics format, supported by:
  • Calcite
  • Cassandra
  • Apache Drill
  • Hadoop
  • HBase
  • Ibis
  • Impala
  • Kudu
  • Pandas
  • Parquet
  • Phoenix
  • Spark
  • Storm

ORC

• columnar
• optimized for reads, write overhead
• lightweight indexing or skipping blocks of rows
• basic stats embedded (min, max, sum, count)
• no schema evolution yet

-d   dumps data rather than metadata Hive 0.15 / 1.1 onwards
--rowindex <cols>
-t  timezone of the writer  Hive 1.2 onwards
-j  prints metadata as json Hive 1.3 onwards
-p  pretty print json

hive --orcfiledump [-j] [-p] [-d] [-t] [--rowindex <col_ids>] <location-of-orc-file>

CSV

https://pythonhosted.org/chkcsv/

csvkit - CLI tools for working with CSV files

csvgroup - SQL-like selects against CSV files

json2csv - CLI to convert from JSON to CSV:

json2csv

JSON

See JSON doc page.

BSON

Binary JSON

CSON

CoffeeScript Object Notation

Cursive Script Object Notation - used by Atom editor config files

schema-compressed JSON - can omit some syntax which is inferred

• strict superset of JSON
• allows # line comments
• trailing commas or missing commas between elements if separated by newlines

looks like there is a default cson module in Python 2.7

:octocat: gt3389b/python-cson

pip install python-cson

python-cson $pytools/tests/data/test.json -f /dev/stdout

TOML

Tom's Obvious Minimal Language

Similar to ini format.

Has "table expansion" (nesting):

[a.b.c]
d = 'Hello'
e = 'World'

XML

XML Lint

Available from packages:

• libxml (RPM)
• libxml2-utils ( Deb / Apk )
• automatically available on Mac

xmllint --format "$file.xml"

Or pipe XML in via standard input to validate and and use --format to pretty print it:

xmllint --format - < "$file.xml"

XML Starlet

An excellent program that can format, validate and select data from XML, and even escape / unescape special XML characters like & vs &.

xmlstarlet --help

YAML

See YAML doc.

HBase vs Parquet vs Avro

• HBase - mutable data, but not scans eg count(*)
• Avro (row-based) - full scans all fields
• Parquet (columnar) - restricting queries to subset of columns

Ported from private Knowledge Base page 2014+