ODV ASCII

Read the files

read_odv_ascii(glob_paths)

SELECT * FROM read_odv_ascii('odv/**/*.txt') LIMIT 100;

The JSON query API also gives ODV ASCII as the odv source.

Inspect the schema

Check the columns and the types before you write a query:

SELECT * FROM read_odv_ascii('odv/**/*.txt') LIMIT 0;

Inspect a schema compares the _schema functions, SUMMARIZE, DESCRIBE and LIMIT 0, and says what each one costs.

Format details

Beacon does not find ODV in the dataset store automatically. Delta Lake is the other such format. ODV also has no CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE ... STORED AS ODV form. Point read_odv_ascii() at the files. Wrap the call in a view to get a stable name:

CREATE VIEW odv_profiles AS
SELECT * FROM read_odv_ascii('odv/**/*.txt');

Compress your ODV ASCII files with zstd. This reduces the storage and the I/O:

zstd -9 < input.txt > output.txt.zst

Beacon detects the compression automatically. It decompresses the file during the read. A zstd-compressed ODV file also works on object storage.

See Data Sources for the full read model.