================================= Announcing PyTables 2.2 (final) ================================= I'm happy to announce PyTables 2.2 (final). After 18 months of continuous development and testing, this is, by far, the most powerful and well-tested release ever. I hope you like it too. What's new ========== The main new features in 2.2 series are: * A new compressor called Blosc, designed to read/write data to/from memory at speeds that can be faster than a system `memcpy()` call. With it, many internal PyTables operations that are currently bounded by CPU or I/O bandwith are speed-up. Some benchmarks: http://blosc.pytables.org/trac/wiki/SyntheticBenchmarks And a demonstration on how Blosc can improve PyTables performance: http://www.pytables.org/docs/manual/ch05.html#chunksizeFineTune * Support for HDF5 hard links, soft links and external links (kind of mounting external filesystems). A new tutorial about its usage has been added to the 'Tutorials' chapter of User's Manual. See: http://www.pytables.org/docs/manual/ch03.html#LinksTutorial * A new `tables.Expr` module (based on Numexpr) that allows to do persistent, on-disk computations on many algebraic operations. For a brief look on its performance, see: http://pytables.org/moin/ComputingKernel * Suport for 'fancy' indexing (i.e., à la NumPy) in all the data containers in PyTables. Backported from the implementation in the h5py project. Thanks to Andrew Collette for his fine work on this! * Binaries for both Windows 32-bit and 64-bit are provided now. As always, a large amount of bugs have been addressed and squashed too. In case you want to know more in detail what has changed in this version, have a look at: http://www.pytables.org/moin/ReleaseNotes/Release_2.2 You can download a source package with generated PDF and HTML docs, as well as binaries for Windows, from: http://www.pytables.org/download/preliminary For an on-line version of the manual, visit: http://www.pytables.org/docs/manual-2.2 What it is? =========== PyTables is a library for managing hierarchical datasets and designed to efficiently cope with extremely large amounts of data with support for full 64-bit file addressing. PyTables runs on top of the HDF5 library and NumPy package for achieving maximum throughput and convenient use. Resources ========= About PyTables: http://www.pytables.org About the HDF5 library: http://hdfgroup.org/HDF5/ About NumPy: http://numpy.scipy.org/ Acknowledgments =============== Thanks to many users who provided feature improvements, patches, bug reports, support and suggestions. See the ``THANKS`` file in the distribution package for a (incomplete) list of contributors. Most specially, a lot of kudos go to the HDF5 and NumPy (and numarray!) makers. Without them, PyTables simply would not exist. Share your experience ===================== Let us know of any bugs, suggestions, gripes, kudos, etc. you may have. ---- **Enjoy data!** -- The PyTables Team -- Francesc Alted