Arctic
I've finally completed some documentation regarding Chunkstore, the newest storage library in Arctic. Read on to learn more about this new type! (note: current doc is based on arctic-1.31.0)

Chunkstore serializes and stores Pandas Dataframes and Series into user defined chunks in MongoDB. Retrieving specific chunks, or ranges of chunks, is very fast and efficient. Chunkstore is optimized more for reading than for writing, and is ideal for use cases where very large datasets need to be accessed by 'chunk'.

Chunkstore supports pluggable serializers. A Serializer is used to convert the Pandas datatype into something that can be efficiently stored by Mongo. Chunkstore's default serializer is the FrameConverter which works by converting each column in the dataframe to a compressed Numpy array. Columns can be retrieved individually this way, without deserializing the other columns in the dataframe.

Chunkstore also supports pluggable chunkers. A chunker takes the dataframe and converts it into chunks. Chunks are stored individually in Mongo for easy retrieval by chunk. Chunkstore currently has two chunkers: DateRange Chunker and PassThrough Chunker. The DateRange chunker chunks a dataframe by a datetime index or column. Currently it must be called 'date'. It chunks by a period, Daily, Monthly, or Yearly. The data can be retrieved from Mongo for any date range, so for DateRange chunked data, its important that the chunking period (or size) be selected appropriately. If data will frequently be read in daily increments, choosing a Year chunk size doesn't really make sense and will be slower than data access of daily chunked data. The PassThrough chunker simply takes the dataframe and writes it to mongo. It does not chunk the data.

Reading and Writing Data




from arctic import CHUNK_STORE, Arctic

a = Arctic(‘localhost’)
a.initialize_library(‘chunkstore', lib_type=CHUNK_STORE)
lib = a[‘chunkstore’]


At this point you have an empty Chunkstore library. You can write data to it several ways. The most basic is to use the write method. Write takes the following arguments:


symbol, item, chunker=DateChunker(), **kwargs


symbol is the name that is used to store/retrieve the data in Arctic. item is the dataframe/series. If you wish to change the chunker type, you can use the keyword arg chunker to specify a new chunker. Optional keyword args are passed on to the chunker. For the case of DateRange chunker, you can specify a chunk_size (D, M, or Y).

write is designed to write and replace data. If you write symbol test with one dataset and write it again with another, the original data will be overwritten.


>>> from pandas import DataFrame, MultiIndex
>>> from datetime import datetime as dt


>>> df = DataFrame(data={'data': [1, 2, 3]},
                   index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 1), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 2), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 3), 1)],
                                                names=['date', 'id']))
>>> lib.write('test', df)
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1      1
2016-01-02 1      2
2016-01-03 1      3


>>> df = DataFrame(data={'data': [100, 200, 300]},
                   index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 1), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 2), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 3), 1)],
                                               names=['date', 'id']))

>>> lib.write('test', df)
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300



We've also introduced the read method here. Read takes the following arguments:


symbol, chunk_range=None, filter_data=True, **kwargs

symbol is the key for the data you wish to retrieve, chunk_range varies by chunker. For DateRange chunker, the chunk_range can be a Pandas DatetimeIndex or it can be an Arctic DateRange object. DateRange allows you to specify a date range ('2016-01-01', '2016-09-30') with start and end dates, as well as open ended ranges (None, '2016-09-30'). Ranges can be open at either end. A chunk range allows you to limit the data retrieved. Without specifying a chunk_range, you will retrieve all the data for the symbol. filter_data is not something you'd commonly want to modify. By default, if you give it a chunk_range you'll ONLY receive data included in that range, even if the range is smaller than a chunk size. filter_data tells Chunkstore to filter the data from the chunk(s) by the chunk_range even further (if possible). For example: if data is stored monthly, but you give it a range of a single day, with filter_data enabled, you'll only get the data for that single day. With it disabled, you'll get all the data in the chunks that the chunk_range overlaps.


>>> df = DataFrame(data={'data': [100, 200, 300]},
                   index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 1), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 2), 1),
                                                 (dt(2016, 1, 3), 1)],
                                                names=['date', 'id']))



>>> lib.write('test', df, chunk_size='M')
>>> lib.read('test', chunk_range=pd.date_range('2016-01-01', '2016-01-01'))
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100


>>> lib.read('test', chunk_range=pd.date_range('2016-01-01', '2016-01-01'), filter_data=False)
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300

There are other ways to write data. Chunkstore supports append and update as well. The main difference between the two is that update is idempotent while append is not. If you continually append the same data N times, you'll get N copies of that data in the dataframe. Append only allows you to add data, it will not modify any data already written. Update is idempotent, and does allow you to modify already written data. Whereas append simply finds a chunk, and adds new data to it, update finds a chunk and replaces data in it with the new data. Let's take a look at some examples.


>>> df = DataFrame(data={'data': [100, 200, 300]},
                  index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 1), 1),
                                                (dt(2016, 1, 2), 1),
                                                (dt(2016, 1, 3), 1)],
                                               names=['date', 'id']))


>>> lib.write('test', df, chunk_size='M')
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300

If we take the above symbol, test and append data, we should see the data replicated as many times as we append


>>> lib.append('test', df)
>>> lib.append('test', df)
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
           1    100
           1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
           1    200
           1    200
2016-01-03 1    300
           1    300
           1    300


As expected, we have the data from the original write, and then two more copies of the data. If we do the same exercise with update, you'll notice a big difference.


>>> lib.write('test', df, chunk_size='M')
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300


>>> lib.update('test', df)
>>> lib.update('test', df)
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300


Lets try that again, but update with different data


>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300


>>> df2 = DataFrame(data={'data': [15]},
                   index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 15), 1)],
                                                names=['date', 'id']))
>>> lib.update('test', df2)
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-15 1     15


In its most basic form, update replaces chunks in Mongo with chunks in the new data. All the old chunks are deleted and replaced.

Let's take a look at the arguments that append and update take.


append: symbol, item


Append is quite simple - it takes a symbol name to append to, and item to append.


update: symbol, item, chunk_range=None, upsert=False, **kwargs


Update similarly takes a symbol and item, but has several optional arguments. chunk_range allows you to subset a part of the chunk to overwrite. In the previous example, we overwrote the entire monthly chunk, but you can overwrite a subset of a chunk with chunk_range.


>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300


>>> df2 = DataFrame(data={'data': [15]},
                    index=MultiIndex.from_tuples([(dt(2016, 1, 2), 1)],
                                                 names=['date', 'id']))


>>> lib.update('test', df2, chunk_range=pd.date_range('2016-01-02', '2016-01-03'))
>>> lib.read('test')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1     15


Note that the chunk_range specified on the update did not match all the datetimeindex of df2. We essentially are telling Chunkstore to replace all the data in chunk_range with the data in df2.

The other optional arguments, upsert and **kwargs are only used when upsert is true. If upsert is false, and symbol does not exist, an exception will be raised. If upsert is true, and a symbol does not exist, write will be called with 'symbol, 'item and **kwargs. This means you can specify the same args in **kwargs that you would for a write (chunker, etc).

Renaming and Deleting Data in Chunkstore

You can also delete and rename symbols in Chunkstore. rename works as you might expect - You give it a symbol name that you want to rename, and you give it the new symbol name.


>>> lib.rename('test', 'new_name')
>>> lib.read('new_name')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1     15


>>> lib.read('test')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NoDataFoundException
Traceback (most recent call last)
----> 1 lib.read('test')

arctic/chunkstore/chunkstore.py in read(self, symbol, chunk_range, filter_data, **kwargs)
    199         sym = self._get_symbol_info(symbol)
    200         if not sym:
--> 201             raise NoDataFoundException('No data found for %s' % (symbol))
    202
    203         spec = {SYMBOL: symbol,

NoDataFoundException: No data found for test


Once a symbol is renamed, the old symbol ceases to exist. Delete also works as you might expect, except it also allows you to delete data within a chunk_range as opposed to deleting an entire symbol.


>>> lib.delete('new_name')
>>> lib.write('new_name', df)
>>> lib.read('new_name')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-02 1    200
2016-01-03 1    300


>>> lib.delete('new_name', pd.date_range('2016-01-02', '2016-01-02'))
>>> lib.read('new_name')
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100
2016-01-03 1    300


Other Chunkstore Operations

Other methods on Chunkstore include:
  • list_symbols()
  • get_info(symbol)
  • get_chunk_ranges(symbol, chunk_range=None, reverse=False)
  • iterator(symbol, chunk_range=None)
  • reverse_iterator(symbol, chunk_range=None)
  • list_symbols list all the symbols in the current library.



>>> lib.list_symbols()
[u'new_name']


get_info returns a dictionary of metadata and information about the symbol, without having to read back any of the chunked data.


>>> lib.get_info('new_name')
{'chunk_count': 2,
 'chunk_size': u'D',
 'chunker': u'date',
 'len': 2,
 'metadata': {u'columns': [u'date', u'id', u'data']},
 'serializer': u'FrameToArray'}


chunk_count is the number of chunks in MongoDB, len is the number of rows in the dataframe, and metadata contains the column information. The rest of the keys should be self explanatory.

get_chunk_ranges returns a generator that produces all the chunk_ranges for the symbol. You can use the optional argument chunk_rage to subset the data, and reverse to produce the list in reverse order.


>>> list(lib.get_chunk_ranges('new_name'))
[('2016-01-01', '2016-01-01'), ('2016-01-03', '2016-01-03')]


The two iterator methods also produce generators that allow you to traverse the entire symbol, one chunk at a time. Both take an optional argument, chunk_range that allows you to subset the chunks that the generator will traverse. iterator goes in order from start to end, reverse iterator goes from end to start.


>>> for chunk in lib.reverse_iterator('new_name'):
        print("Chunk is: ")
        print(chunk)

Chunk is:
               data
date       id
2016-01-03 1    300

Chunk is:
               data
date       id
2016-01-01 1    100