ORC Files

Since Spark 2.3, Spark supports a vectorized ORC reader with a new ORC file format for ORC files. To do that, the following configurations are newly added. The vectorized reader is used for the native ORC tables (e.g., the ones created using the clause USING ORC) when spark.sql.orc.impl is set to native and spark.sql.orc.enableVectorizedReader is set to true. For the Hive ORC serde tables (e.g., the ones created using the clause USING HIVE OPTIONS (fileFormat 'ORC')), the vectorized reader is used when spark.sql.hive.convertMetastoreOrc is also set to true.

Property NameDefaultMeaning
spark.sql.orc.impl native The name of ORC implementation. It can be one of native and hive. native means the native ORC support that is built on Apache ORC 1.4. `hive` means the ORC library in Hive 1.2.1.
spark.sql.orc.enableVectorizedReader true Enables vectorized orc decoding in native implementation. If false, a new non-vectorized ORC reader is used in native implementation. For hive implementation, this is ignored.