| Author: | Francesc Alted |
|---|---|
| Contact: | francesc@blosc.org |
| Version: | 1.0 (March 8, 2016) |
This document explains how the data is stored in the bcolz format. The goals of this format are:
- Allow to work with datasets (carray/ctable) directly on disk, exactly on the same way than data in memory.
- Must support the same access capabilities than carray/ctable objects including: append data, modying data and direct access to data.
- Transparent data compression must be possible.
- The data should be easily 'shardeable' for optimal behaviour in a distributed storage environment.
- User metadata addition must be possible too.
For every dataset, a directory is created, with a user-provided name that, for generality, we will call it root here. The root will have another couple of subdirectories, named data and meta:
root (the name of the dataset) / \ data meta
The data directory contains the actual data of the dataset, while the meta will contain the meta-information (dtype, shape, chunkshape, compression level, filters...).
Data is stored in data blocks that are called superchunks, and each superchunk will use exactly one file. The size of each superchunk will be decided automatically by default, but it could be specified by the user too.
Each of these directories will contain one or more chunks for storing the actual data. Every data chunk will be named after its sequential number. For example:
$ ls data __0.blp __1.blp __2.blp __3.blp ... __1030.blp
This structure of separate superchunk files allows for two things:
- Datasets can be enlarged and shrinked very easily.
- Horizontal sharding in a distributed system is possible (and cheap!).
At its time, the data directory might contain other subdirectories that are meant for storing components for a ctable (i.e. an structured array like, but stored in column-wise order):
data (the root for a nested datatype)
/ \ \
col1 col2 col3 (first-level colmuns)
/ \
sc1 sc3 (-> nested columns, if exist)
This structure allows for quick access to specific superchunks of columns without a need to load the complete dataset in memory.
The superchunk is made of a series of data blocks put together using the C-Blosc 1.x metacompressor by default. Blosc being a metacompressor, means that it can use different compressors and filters, while leveraging its blocking and multithreading capabilities.
The layout of binary superchunk data files looks like this:
|-0-|-1-|-2-|-3-|-4-|-5-|-6-|-7-|-8-|-9-|-A-|-B-|-C-|-D-|-E-|-F-|
| b l p k | ^ | RESERVED | nchunks |
version
The first four are the magic string 'blpk'. The next one is an 8 bit unsigned little-endian integer that encodes the format version. The next three are reserved, and in the last eight there is a signed 64 bit little endian integer that encodes the number of Blosc chunks inside the superchunk.
Currently (bcolz 1.x), version is 1 and nchunks always has a value of 1 (this might change in bcolz 2.0).
After the above header, it follows the actual data in Blosc chunk. At its time, each chunk has this format (Blosc 1.x):
|-0-|-1-|-2-|-3-|-4-|-5-|-6-|-7-|-8-|-9-|-A-|-B-|-C-|-D-|-E-|-F-| ^ ^ ^ ^ | nbytes | blocksize | ctbytes | | | | | | | | +--typesize | | +------flags | +----------blosclz version +--------------blosc version
For more details on this, see the C-Blosc header description.
Here there can be as many files as necessary. The format for every file is JSON. There should be (at least) two files:
This contains the shape and compressed and uncompressed sizes of the dataset. For example:
$ cat meta/sizes
{"shape": [100000], "nbytes": 400000, "cbytes": 266904}
Here comes the information about how data has to be stored and its meaning. Example:
$ cat meta/sizes
{"dtype": "int32", "cparams": {"shuffle": true, "clevel": 5}, "chunklen": 65536, "dflt": 0, "expectedlen": 100000}
Finally, in this file (placed at the root directory for each dataset) it comes additional user information (not mandatory) serialized in JSON format. Example:
$ cat __attrs__
{"temp": 22.5, "pressure": 999.2, "timestamp": "2016030915"}