ORC
Apache ORC (Optimized Row Columnar)
Judgement: Situational
Pick if you're in Hive/Tez territory; otherwise Parquet wins.
Columnar file format created for the Hive ecosystem. Strong compression and ACID support inside Hive.
Less common in greenfield projects today — Parquet has won most workloads — but still pervasive in big-data installations.
Why it counts as a standard
ORC's on-disk format is an open Apache spec with independent readers in Java, C++, and Rust. Hive, Spark, Trino, Presto and others read and write the same files because they target the format, not a single library. The file format is the standard surface.
At a glance
- Category
- File Formats
- Governance
- Apache Software Foundation
- Status
- Stable; mostly seen in Hive-era stacks
- First released
- 2013
Links
Related standards
Other standards in File Formats.
- AVRO — Apache Avro
- CSV — Comma-Separated Values (RFC 4180)
- JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
- PARQUET — Apache Parquet
- XML — Extensible Markup Language
- YAML — YAML Ain't Markup Language
- Lance
See ORC in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare ORC against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.