persistence.rst

RFC for a persistence layer for bcolz

Author

Francesc Alted

Contact

francesc@blosc.org

Version

0.1 (August 19, 2012)

The original bcolz container (up to version 0.4) consisted on basically a list of compressed in-memory blocks. This document explains how to extend it to allow to store the data blocks on disk too.

The goals of this proposal are:

1. Allow to work with data directly on disk, exactly on the same way

than data in memory.

2. Must support the same access capabilities than bcolz objects

including: append data, modifying data and direct access to data.

3. Transparent data compression must be possible.
4. User metadata addition must be possible too.
5. The data should be easily 'shardeable' for optimal behaviour in a distributed storage environment.

This, in combination with a distributed filesystem, and combined with a system that is aware of the physical topology of the underlying storage media would allow to almost replace the need for a distributed infrastructure for data (e.g. Disco/Hadoop).

The layout

For every dataset, it will be created a directory, 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 will contain the actual data of the dataset, while the meta will contain the metainformation (dtype, shape, chunkshape, compression level, filters...).

The data layout

Data will be stored by what is called a superchunk, 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 superchunks for storing the actual data. Every data superchunk will be named after its sequential number. For example:

$ ls data
__1__.bin  __2__.bin  __3__.bin  __4__.bin ... __1030__.bin

This structure of separate superchunk files allows for two things:

1. Datasets can be enlarged and shrinked very easily
2. 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 'nested' dtype (i.e. an structured array, stored in column-wise order):

data  (the root for a nested datatype)
/  \     \

col1 col2 col3

/

sc1 sc3

This structure allows for quick access to specific chunks of columns without a need to load the complete data in memory.

The superchunk layout

The superchunk is made of a series of data chunks put together using the Blosc 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 | ^ | ^ | ^ | ^ |   chunk-size  |  last-chunk   |
                  |   |   |   |
      version ----+   |   |   |
      options --------+   |   |
     checksum ------------+   |
     typesize ----------------+

|-0-|-1-|-2-|-3-|-4-|-5-|-6-|-7-|-8-|-9-|-A-|-B-|-C-|-D-|-E-|-F-|
|            nchunks            |            RESERVED           |

The magic 'blpk' signature is the same than the bloscpack format. The new version (2) of the format will allow to include indexes (offsets to where the data chunks begin) and checksums (probably using the adler32 algorithm or similar).

After the above header, it will follow index data and the actual data in blosc chunks:

|-bloscpack-header-|-offset-|-offset-|...|-chunk-|-chunk-|...|

The index part above stores the offsets where each chunk starts, so it is is easy to access the different chunks in the superchunk file.

CAVEAT: The bloscpack format is still evolving, so don't trust on forward compatibility of the format, at least until 1.0, where the internal format will be declared frozen.

And each blosc chunk has this format (Blosc 1.0 on):

|-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

At the end of each blosc chunk some empty space could be added in order to allow the modification of some data elements inside each block. The reason for the additional space is that, as these chunks will be typically compressed, when modifying some element of the chunk it is not guaranteed that it will fit in the same space than the old data chunk. Having this provision of small empty space at the end of each chunk will allow for storing the modifyed chunks in many cases, without a need to save the entire superchunk on a different part of the disk.

The meta files

Here there can be as many files as necessary. The format for every file will tentatively be YAML (although initial implementations are using JSON). There should be (at least) three files:

The sizes file

This contains the shape and compressed and uncompressed sizes of the dataset. For example:

$ cat meta/sizes
shape: (5000000000,)
nbytes: 5000000000
cbytes: 24328038

The storage file

Here comes the information about how data has to be stored and its meaning. Example:

dtype: 
  col1: int8
  col2: float32
chunkshape: (30, 20)
superchunksize: 10  # max. number of chunks in a single file
endianness: big  # default: little
order: C         # default: C
compression:
  library: blosclz   # could be zlib, fastlz or others
  level: 5
  filters: [shuffle, truncate]  # order matters

The attributes file

In this file it comes additional user information. Example:

temperature:
  value: 23.5
  type: scalar
  dtype: float32
pressure:
  value: 225.5
  type: scalar
  dtype: float32
ids:
  value: [1,3,6,10]
  type: array
  dtype: int32

More files could be added for providing other kind of meta-information about data (read indexes, masks...).