xmhuffman

A small, fast Cython extension that decodes the canonical-Huffman string dictionary pages used by xVelocity / Vertipaq column stores — the storage format inside Power BI .pbix files (the DataModel part) and Excel Power Pivot workbooks (xl/model/item.data).

Provides a tight C kernel for what would otherwise be a per-symbol Python loop. On real .pbix files this is 30–50× faster than an equivalent pure-Python implementation and removes a hot path that dominates table extraction time in tools like pbixray.

Installation

pip install xmhuffman

Building from source requires a C compiler and Cython ≥ 3.0:

git clone https://github.com/Hugoberry/xmhuffman-cython
cd xmhuffman-cython
pip install -e .

Usage

The library exposes a tiny surface — one entry point for the common case plus a few lower-level helpers.

Decode a dictionary page

import xmhuffman

# All inputs come straight from the Vertipaq dictionary page metadata:
#   bitstream  — compressed_string_buffer (bytes)
#   encode_array_128 — 128-byte nibble-packed code-length array
#   offsets    — per-string start bit offsets (sequence of u32)
#   total_bits — store_total_bits (end of last string)
strings: list[bytes] = xmhuffman.decode_page(
    bitstream,
    encode_array_128,
    offsets,
    total_bits,
    swap=True,            # apply the byte-pair swap inside the extension
)

Output is list[bytes]. Charset interpretation is the caller's choice (see Character-set modes below): Vertipaq pages declare themselves as either single character set or multiple character set, and the caller decodes the returned bytes accordingly.

Single-charset pages with non-zero CharacterSetUsed

When a single-charset page carries a non-zero CharacterSetUsed byte, the spec requires reinserting that byte as the UTF-16-LE high byte of every decoded character before the byte stream is meaningful as text. xmhuffman can perform that interleave inside the extension:

# charset_mode='single' + charset_byte != 0 returns interleaved bytes,
# each output element being 2 * decoded_length bytes long, ready for
# direct `bytes.decode('utf-16-le')` by the caller.
strings = xmhuffman.decode_page(
    bitstream, encode_array_128, offsets, total_bits,
    swap=True,
    charset_mode='single',
    charset_byte=character_set_used,
)
text = [b.decode('utf-16-le') for b in strings]

For pages with CharacterSetUsed == 0, the default decode_page(...) call is sufficient — b.decode('latin-1') on its output is byte-for-byte equivalent to the interleave path and several times faster, so callers should branch on CharacterSetUsed:

if character_set_used == 0:
    strings = xmhuffman.decode_page(bitstream, encode_array_128,
                                    offsets, total_bits)
    text = [b.decode('latin-1') for b in strings]
else:
    strings = xmhuffman.decode_page(bitstream, encode_array_128,
                                    offsets, total_bits,
                                    charset_mode='single',
                                    charset_byte=character_set_used)
    text = [b.decode('utf-16-le') for b in strings]

For multiple character set pages the raw decoded byte stream is already UTF-16-LE; b[:len(b) & ~1].decode('utf-16-le') is the canonical caller-side path.

Lower-level building blocks

For callers that want to amortize table construction across pages, or just to unit-test pieces:

# Expand the 128-byte nibble-packed array to 256 plain bytes of lengths.
lengths = xmhuffman.decompress_encode_array(encode_array_128)

# Pair-swap a buffer (bytes 2k and 2k+1 swap; trailing odd byte left as-is).
swapped = xmhuffman.swap_bytes(raw)

# Build the flat decode table once, reuse it across decode calls.
table_bytes, max_len = xmhuffman.build_table(encode_array_128)
strings = xmhuffman.decode_with_table(
    bitstream, table_bytes, max_len, offsets, total_bits, swap=True,
)

Format notes

The on-disk format is documented publicly in Microsoft's open specification [MS-XLDM] §2.7.4 — Huffman Compression. Each dictionary page is, schematically:

Field	Description
encode_array	128 bytes, two 4-bit code lengths per byte (low nibble = symbol 2i, high = 2i+1). Value 0 means "symbol unused". Per [MS-XLDM] codeword lengths are between 2 and 15 bits.
uiDecodeBits	Width of the on-disk primary lookup table (≤ 12). This decoder uses a single flat 2^max_len table instead and ignores uiDecodeBits.
compressed_string_buffer	The bitstream itself, with adjacent bytes pair-swapped on disk. No padding between strings.
store_total_bits	Total logical bit length; end sentinel for the last string.
vector_of_record_handle_structures	Per-record (bit_offset, page_id); sorted offsets per page give the per-string start boundaries.

Codes are classical Huffman, encoded canonically by sorting (length, symbol) ascending and incrementing the code with a left-shift on length changes — exactly the reconstruction described in [MS-XLDM] §2.7.4.1.5.

Character-set modes

[MS-XLDM] §2.7.4.1.4 distinguishes two modes per page:

• Single character set (character_set_type_identifier = 0x000aba91) — only the low byte of each character is Huffman-encoded; the upper (charset) byte is stored once on the page as CharacterSetUsed and must be reinserted to recover the original 2-byte character stream. Pass charset_mode='single', charset_byte=CharacterSetUsed to decode_page / decode_with_table to have the extension perform that reinsertion. When CharacterSetUsed == 0 you can skip the kwargs and feed the raw bytes output straight to b.decode('latin-1') for the same result at lower cost.
• Multiple character sets (0x000aba92) — both bytes are encoded; the output byte stream is consumed directly as UTF-16LE.

Reinsertion order is the one the reference encoder/decoder uses: each emitted byte becomes the UTF-16-LE low byte and CharacterSetUsed becomes the high byte, so output element k is exactly bytes([symbol, CharacterSetUsed]) * nwritten.

Performance

Apples-to-apples against an equivalent pure-Python decoder on a few real .pbix files:

File	Strings	Python ref	xmhuffman	Speedup
Adventure Works DW 2020	191,489	449 ms	10.0 ms	45×
Sales & Marketing sample	103,290	160 ms	5.3 ms	30×
Retail Analysis sample	9	144 ms	2.9 ms	50×

The kernel does one unaligned 64-bit big-endian load, one shift, one mask, one table lookup and one byte store per output symbol. The decode table is a flat 2^max_len array of uint16_t (≤ 64 KB; usually 1–8 KB) that fits comfortably in L1/L2.

Parallel scaling

decode_page and decode_with_table are designed to run inside a concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor with no special setup. The entire per-page work — bit-stream walk plus charset reinsertion when requested — happens inside a single with nogil: block. Python objects (the list[bytes] result) are constructed only after the kernel returns, in one tight pass under the GIL.

The practical effect on a 2,703-page workload (meta.pbix, 7.1M strings) on an 8-core M-class machine:

Workers	Wall clock	Speedup vs. n=1
1	10.85 s	1.00×
2	6.19 s	1.75×
4	3.92 s	2.77×
8	2.60 s	4.17×

Scaling is monotonic up to physical-core count; the function does not fight the GIL on per-string allocation.

Project layout

xmhuffman-cython/
├── xmhuffman.pyx         # Cython surface
├── xmhuffman.pxd         # C declarations
├── src/xmhuffman_kernel.c    # C kernel
├── include/xmhuffman_kernel.h
├── tests/                # correctness tests
└── bench/                # micro-benchmark

Testing

pip install -e .
pip install pytest
pytest tests/ -v

The basic test suite checks each helper against a pure-Python reference implementation. An additional integration test (tests/test_pbix.py) decodes pages out of real .pbix files and asserts byte-identity with the reference; it is skipped automatically when fixtures aren't available.

Scope and non-goals

• Not a general-purpose Huffman library. Alphabets are fixed at 256 symbols, codeword lengths are capped at 15 bits, and the bitstream convention is the one used by Vertipaq pages.
• Not an encoder. Round-tripping pages is out of scope.
• No Python-string outputs. The decoder returns raw bytes; the caller picks between latin-1 and paired UTF-16-LE based on the page's character-set identifier. The charset_mode='single', charset_byte=cb option performs the spec-defined CharacterSetUsed reinsertion as a byte interleave (still bytes out) so the caller can b.decode('utf-16-le') it directly.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Acknowledgements

This package is the third in a family of thin Cython wrappers around Microsoft column-store / compression formats, alongside xpress8-python and xpress9-python.

The format itself is documented publicly in Microsoft's open specification [MS-XLDM] — Spreadsheet Data Model File Format, which the implementation here follows. The Python reference and end-to-end test fixtures come from the pbixray project.