================================ Announcing python-blosc 1.1 RC1 ================================

What is it? ===========

python-blosc (http://blosc.pydata.org/) is a Python wrapper for the Blosc compression library.

Blosc (http://blosc.org) is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data. It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() OS call. Whether this is achieved or not depends of the data compressibility, the number of cores in the system, and other factors. See a series of benchmarks conducted for many different systems: http://blosc.org/trac/wiki/SyntheticBenchmarks.

Blosc works well for compressing numerical arrays that contains data with relatively low entropy, like sparse data, time series, grids with regular-spaced values, etc.

There is also a handy command line for Blosc called Bloscpack (https://github.com/esc/bloscpack) that allows you to compress large binary datafiles on-disk. Although the format for Bloscpack has not stabilized yet, it allows you to effectively use Blosc from your favorite shell.

What is new? ============

- Added new `compress_ptr` and `decompress_ptr` functions that allows to compress and decompress from/to a data pointer. These are low level calls and user must make sure that the pointer data area is safe.

- Since Blosc (the C library) already supports to be installed as an standalone library (via cmake), it is also possible to link python-blosc against a system Blosc library.

- The Python calls to Blosc are now thread-safe (another consequence of recent Blosc library supporting this at C level).

- Many checks on types and ranges of values have been added. Most of the calls will now complain when passed the wrong values.

- Docstrings are much improved. Also, Sphinx-based docs are available now.

Many thanks to Valentin Hänel for his impressive work for this release.

For more info, you can see the release notes in:

https://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc/wiki/Release-notes

More docs and examples are available in the documentation site:

http://blosc.pydata.org

Installing ==========

python-blosc is in PyPI repository, so installing it is easy:

$ pip install -U blosc # yes, you should omit the blosc- prefix

Download sources ================

The sources are managed through github services at:

http://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc

Documentation =============

There is Sphinx-based documentation site at:

http://blosc.pydata.org/

Mailing list ============

There is an official mailing list for Blosc at:

blosc@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.es/group/blosc

Licenses ========

Both Blosc and its Python wrapper are distributed using the MIT license. See:

https://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc/blob/master/LICENSES

for more details.

-- Francesc Alted