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# pandas.DataFrame.to_orc

DataFrame.to_orc(path=None, *, engine='pyarrow', index=None, engine_kwargs=None)

  Write a DataFrame to the Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) format.

  ORC is a self-describing, type-aware columnar file format designed for Hadoop workloads. It provides efficient compression and encoding schemes, making it well-suited for large-scale data storage and analytics. This method requires the `pyarrow` library.

  Parameters:
    path str, file-like object or None, default None

      If a string, it will be used as Root Directory path when writing a partitioned dataset. By file-like object, we refer to objects with a write() method, such as a file handle (e.g. via builtin open function). If path is None, a bytes object is returned.

    engine{‘pyarrow’}, default ‘pyarrow’

      ORC library to use.

    index bool, optional

      If `True`, include the dataframe’s index(es) in the file output. If `False`, they will not be written to the file. If `None`, similar to `infer` the dataframe’s index(es) will be saved. However, instead of being saved as values, the RangeIndex will be stored as a range in the metadata so it doesn’t require much space and is faster. Other indexes will be included as columns in the file output.

    engine_kwargs dict[str, Any] or None, default None

      Additional keyword arguments passed to `pyarrow.orc.write_table()`.

  Returns:
    bytes if no `path` argument is provided else None

      Bytes object with DataFrame data if `path` is not specified else None.

  Raises:
    NotImplementedError

      Dtype of one or more columns is category, unsigned integers, interval, period or sparse.

    ValueError

      engine is not pyarrow.

  See also

  `read_orc`

    Read a ORC file.

  `DataFrame.to_parquet`

    Write a parquet file.

  `DataFrame.to_csv`

    Write a csv file.

  `DataFrame.to_sql`

    Write to a sql table.

  `DataFrame.to_hdf`

    Write to hdf.

  Notes

  - Find more information on ORC here.

  - Before using this function you should read the user guide about ORC and install optional dependencies.

  - This function requires pyarrow library.

  - For supported dtypes please refer to supported ORC features in Arrow.

  - Currently timezones in datetime columns are not preserved when a dataframe is converted into ORC files.

  Examples

      >>> df = pd.DataFrame(data={"col1": [1, 2], "col2": [4, 3]})
      >>> df.to_orc("df.orc")
      >>> pd.read_orc("df.orc")
         col1  col2
      0     1     4
      1     2     3

  If you want to get a buffer to the orc content you can write it to io.BytesIO

      >>> import io
      >>> b = io.BytesIO(df.to_orc())
      >>> b.seek(0)
      0
      >>> content = b.read()