AI engineering glossary · Data engineering
What is ORC?
ORC (also called Optimized Row Columnar): Optimized Row Columnar, a columnar file format originating in the Hadoop ecosystem, storing data in stripes with indexes and statistics. It compresses well and is especially common with Hive workloads.
ORC: an example
A Hive table of telecom call records is stored as ORC so queries on one column skip most of the data.
Related terms
More Data engineering terms
- Orchestration
- Parquet
- Partitioning
- Predicate pushdown
- Protocol Buffers
- Publish-subscribe
- Resilient Distributed Dataset
- Row-oriented storage
Where you learn it
ORC is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.