xpress8-python

Cython bindings for Microsoft's Xpress8 compression library, as shipped in the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) source tree. Released under the MIT License.

This is a sibling of xpress9-python. Xpress8 is the variant used by Power BI's .pbix file format and by various Windows-internal data stores; it is not wire-compatible with Xpress9.

Install

pip install xpress8

Or from source:

pip install -e .

Usage

from xpress8 import Xpress8

x = Xpress8()                       # max_original_size=65536, level=9

# Single-buffer round trip
compressed = x.compress(b"hello world " * 64)
restored   = x.decompress(compressed, len(b"hello world " * 64))

# PBIX-style chunked stream: each chunk has a 4-byte LE header
# (uncompressed_size: u16, compressed_size: u16).
plain = x.decompress_chunked(chunked_blob)

Layout

xpress8.pyx              Cython wrapper class
xpress8.pxd              C declarations
src/Xpress8Wrapper.c     thin C shim over the ESE stream API
src/xencode.c            vendored from ESE _xpress
src/xdecode.c            vendored from ESE _xpress
src/xencode.i            vendored
src/xdecode.i            vendored
include/Xpress8Wrapper.h shim API
include/xpress.h         vendored
include/xprs.h           vendored
include/xpress_compat.h  small portability header for non-MSVC builds

License

MIT. The vendored sources retain their original Microsoft copyright headers.