Apache Carbon Data is a new big data file format for faster interactive query using advanced columnar storage, index, compression and encoding techniques to improve computing efficiency, which helps in speeding up queries by an order of magnitude faster over Peta Bytes of data.
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CarbonData files contain groups of data called blocklets, along with all required information like schema, offsets and indices etc, in a file header and footer, co-located in HDFS.
The file footer can be read once to build the indices in memory, which can be utilized for optimizing the scans and processing for all subsequent queries