ORC

Input	Output	Alias
✔	✔

Description

Apache ORC is a columnar storage format widely used in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Data Types Matching

The table below compares supported ORC data types and their corresponding ClickHouse data types in INSERT and SELECT queries.

ORC data type (INSERT)	ClickHouse data type	ORC data type (SELECT)
Boolean	UInt8	Boolean
Tinyint	Int8/UInt8/Enum8	Tinyint
Smallint	Int16/UInt16/Enum16	Smallint
Int	Int32/UInt32	Int
Bigint	Int64/UInt32	Bigint
Float	Float32	Float
Double	Float64	Double
Decimal	Decimal	Decimal
Date	Date32	Date
Timestamp	DateTime64	Timestamp
String, Char, Varchar, Binary	String	Binary
List	Array	List
Struct	Tuple	Struct
Map	Map	Map
Int	IPv4	Int
Binary	IPv6	Binary
Binary	Int128/UInt128/Int256/UInt256	Binary
Binary	Decimal256	Binary

• Other types are not supported.
• Arrays can be nested and can have a value of the Nullable type as an argument. Tuple and Map types also can be nested.
• The data types of ClickHouse table columns do not have to match the corresponding ORC data fields. When inserting data, ClickHouse interprets data types according to the table above and then casts the data to the data type set for the ClickHouse table column.

Example Usage

Inserting Data

You can insert ORC data from a file into ClickHouse table using the following command:

$ cat filename.orc | clickhouse-client --query="INSERT INTO some_table FORMAT ORC"

Selecting Data

You can select data from a ClickHouse table and save them into some file in the ORC format using the following command:

$ clickhouse-client --query="SELECT * FROM {some_table} FORMAT ORC" > {filename.orc}

Format Settings

Setting	Description	Default
output_format_arrow_string_as_string	Use Arrow String type instead of Binary for String columns.	false
output_format_orc_compression_method	Compression method used in output ORC format. Default value	none
input_format_arrow_case_insensitive_column_matching	Ignore case when matching Arrow columns with ClickHouse columns.	false
input_format_arrow_allow_missing_columns	Allow missing columns while reading Arrow data.	false
input_format_arrow_skip_columns_with_unsupported_types_in_schema_inference	Allow skipping columns with unsupported types while schema inference for Arrow format.	false

To exchange data with Hadoop, you can use HDFS table engine.