What is it?#

C-Blosc2 is the new major version of C-Blosc, and is backward compatible with both the C-Blosc1 API and its in-memory format. Python-Blosc2 is a Python package that wraps C-Blosc2, the newest version of the Blosc compressor.

Currently Python-Blosc2 already reproduces the API of Python-Blosc, so it can be used as a drop-in replacement. However, there are a few exceptions for a full compatibility.

In addition, Python-Blosc2 aims to leverage the new C-Blosc2 API so as to support super-chunks, multi-dimensional arrays (NDArray), serialization and other bells and whistles introduced in C-Blosc2. Although this is always and endless process, we have already catch up with most of the C-Blosc2 API capabilities.

Note: Python-Blosc2 is meant to be backward compatible with Python-Blosc data. That means that it can read data generated with Python-Blosc, but the opposite is not true (i.e. there is no forward compatibility).

SChunk: a 64-bit compressed store#

SChunk is the simple data container that handles setting, expanding and getting data and metadata. Contrarily to chunks, a super-chunk can update and resize the data that it contains, supports user metadata, and it does not have the 2 GB storage limitation.

Additionally, you can convert a SChunk into a contiguous, serialized buffer (aka cframe) and vice-versa; as a bonus, the serialization/deserialization process also works with NumPy arrays and PyTorch/TensorFlow tensors at a blazing speed:

while reaching excellent compression ratios:

Also, if you are a Mac M1/M2 owner, make you a favor and use its native arm64 arch (yes, we are distributing Mac arm64 wheels too; you are welcome ;-):

Read more about SChunk features in our blog entry at: https://www.blosc.org/posts/python-blosc2-improvements

NDArray: an N-Dimensional store#

One of the latest and more exciting additions in Python-Blosc2 is the NDArray object. It can write and read n-dimensional datasets in an extremely efficient way thanks to a n-dim 2-level partitioning, allowing to slice and dice arbitrary large and compressed data in a more fine-grained way:

https://github.com/Blosc/python-blosc2/blob/main/images/b2nd-2level-parts.png?raw=true

To wet you appetite, here it is how the NDArray object performs on getting slices orthogonal to the different axis of a 4-dim dataset:

https://github.com/Blosc/python-blosc2/blob/main/images/Read-Partial-Slices-B2ND.png?raw=true

We have blogged about this: https://www.blosc.org/posts/blosc2-ndim-intro

We also have a ~2 min explanatory video on why slicing in a pineapple-style (aka double partition) is useful: