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Explore Vortex

Vortex is a highly performant, extensible columnar file format, with an associated toolkit for running compute over compressed data in-memory.

Your data without limits

Vortex is our next-generation, open-source columnar format, designed from the ground up to achieve optimal performance on modern hardware. It’s a file format and a memory format, bridging storage and compute for seamless data processing.

Pareto-optimal
Performance

  • 100x faster random access.

  • 2-10x faster scans.

  • 0-50% faster writes.

  • Comparable size to modern Parquet.

Cascaded Lightweight Encodings

  • “White box” encodings support pushdown compute on compressed data.

  • Designed for random access & decompression via SIMD (CPU) & SIMT (GPU).

  • Based on the latest research, like FastLanes, ALP, FSST, & BtrBlocks.

Extensible & Future-proof

  • Rich extension types.

  • Pluggable encodings & compression strategies.

  • Self-describing layouts & WASM decoders allow the format to evolve.

Optimized Metadata

  • Designed for efficient reads from object storage.

  • Zero-copy deserialization efficiently supports wide schemas.

Interoperable

  • Decompressed arrays are zero-copy to/from Apache Arrow.

  • Integrates with Polars, Pandas, DataFusion, DuckDB, Spark, and many other popular frameworks.

Data’s favorite format