ORC Output

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The ORC Output step serializes data from the PDI data stream into an ORC file format, and then writes it to a file. ORC is a data format for fast columnar storage. This step creates a file containing output data in the ORC format.

Fields written to the ORC output file are defined by the input fields. Fields not written to the output file are either deleted, or are written to the output file with alternate field names or default values.

General

Enter the following information in the transformation step fields:

Option	Description
Step name	Specify the unique name of the ORC Output step on the canvas. You can customize the name or leave it as the default.
Folder/File name	Specify the location and name of the file or folder. Click Browse to display the Open File window and navigate to the destination file or folder. For the supported file system types, see Connecting to Virtual File Systems. The ORC files are created.
Overwrite existing output file	Select to overwrite an existing file that has the same file name and extension.

Options

The ORC Output step features two tabs with fields. Each tab is described below.

Fields tab

In the Fields tab, you can define fields that make up the ORC type description created by this step. The table below describes each of the options for configuring the ORC type description.

Field	Description
ORC path	Specify the name of the field as it will appear in the ORC data file or files.
Name	Specify the name of the PDI field.
ORC type	Defines the data type of the field.
Precision	Specify the total number of digits in the number (only applies to the Decimal ORC type). The default value is 20.
Scale	Specify the number of digits after the decimal point (only applies to the Decimal ORC type). The default value is 10.
Default value	Specify the default value of the field if it is null or empty.
Null	Specifies if the field can contain null values.

To avoid a transformation failure, make sure the Default value field contains values for all fields where Null is set to No.

You can define the fields manually, or you can provide a path to the PDI data stream and click Get Fields to populate all the fields. During the retrieval of the fields, a PDI type is converted to an applicable ORC type, as shown in the table below. You can also change the selected ORC type by using the Type drop-down or by entering the type manually.

ORC types

The table below shows how a PDI type is converted to an applicable ORC type.

PDI Type	ORC Type
InetAddress	String
String	String
TimeStamp	TimeStamp
Binary	Binary
BigNumber	Decimal
Boolean	Boolean
Date	Date
Integer	Integer
Number	Double

Options tab

The following options in the Options tab define how the ORC output file will be created.

Field	Description
Compression	Specifies which codec is used to compress the ORC output file: None No compression is used (default). Zlib Writes the data blocks using the deflate algorithm, as specified in RFC 1951, and typically implemented using the zlib library. LZO Writes the data blocks using LZO encoding, which works well for CHAR and VARCHAR columns that store very long character strings. Snappy Using Google's Snappy compression library, writes the data blocks that are followed by the 4-byte, big-endian CRC32 checksum of the uncompressed data in each block.
Stripe size (MB)	Defines the stripe size in megabytes. An ORC file has one or more stripes. Each stripe is composed of rows of data, an index of the data, and a footer containing metadata about the stripe’s contents. Large stripe sizes enable efficient reads from HDFS. The default is 64.See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+ORC for additional information.
Compress size (KB)	Defines the number of kilobytes in each compression chunk. The default is 256.
Inline Indexes	If checked, rows are indexed when written for faster filtering and random access on read.
Rows between entries	Defines the stride size or number of rows between index entries (must be greater than or equal to 1000). The stride size is the block of data that can be skipped by the ORC reader during a read operation based on the indexes. The default is 10000.
Include date in file name	Adds the system date to the filename with format (`20181231` for example).
Include time in file name	Adds the system time to the filename with format `HHmmss` (`235959` for example).
Specify date time format	Select to specify the date time format using the dropdown list.

Important Due to licensing constraints, ORC does not ship with LZO compression libraries; these must be manually installed on each node if you want to use LZO compression.

Metadata injection support

All fields of this step support metadata injection. You can use this step with ETL metadata injection to pass metadata to your transformation at runtime.