ORC is a self-describing type-aware columnar file format designed for Hadoop workloads. It is optimized for large streaming reads, but with integrated support for finding required rows quickly. Storing data in a columnar format lets the reader read, decompress, and process only the values that are required for the current query. Because ORC files are type-aware, the writer chooses the most appropriate encoding for the type and builds an internal index as the file is written. Predicate pushdown uses those indexes to determine which stripes in a file need to be read for a particular query and the row indexes can narrow the search to a particular set of 10,000 rows. ORC supports the complete set of types in Hive, including the complex types: structs, lists, maps, and unions.

This project includes both a Java library and a C++ library for reading and writing the Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format. The C++ and Java libraries are completely independent of each other and will each read all versions of ORC files.

Releases:

• Latest: Apache ORC releases
• Maven Central:
• Downloads: Apache ORC downloads
• Release tags: Apache ORC release tags
• Plan: Apache ORC future release plan

The current build status:

• Main branch

Bug tracking: Apache Jira

The subdirectories are:

• c++ - the c++ reader and writer
• cmake_modules - the cmake modules
• docker - docker scripts to build and test on various linuxes
• examples - various ORC example files that are used to test compatibility
• java - the java reader and writer
• proto - the protocol buffer definition for the ORC metadata
• site - the website and documentation
• tools - the c++ tools for reading and inspecting ORC files

• Install java 17 or higher
• Install maven 3.9.6 or higher
• Install cmake 3.12 or higher

To build a release version with debug information:

% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake ..
% make package
% make test-out

To build a debug version:

% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG
% make package
% make test-out

To build a release version without debug information:

% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE
% make package
% make test-out

To build only the Java library:

% cd java
% ./mvnw package

To build only the C++ library:

% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake .. -DBUILD_JAVA=OFF
% make package
% make test-out

To build the C++ library with AVX512 enabled:

export ORC_USER_SIMD_LEVEL=AVX512
% mkdir build
% cd build
% cmake .. -DBUILD_JAVA=OFF -DBUILD_ENABLE_AVX512=ON
% make package
% make test-out

Cmake option BUILD_ENABLE_AVX512 can be set to "ON" or (default value)"OFF" at the compile time. At compile time, it defines the SIMD level(AVX512) to be compiled into the binaries.

Environment variable ORC_USER_SIMD_LEVEL can be set to "AVX512" or (default value)"NONE" at the run time. At run time, it defines the SIMD level to dispatch the code which can apply SIMD optimization.

Note that if ORC_USER_SIMD_LEVEL is set to "NONE" at run time, AVX512 will not take effect at run time even if BUILD_ENABLE_AVX512 is set to "ON" at compile time.