How does one append large amounts of data to a Pandas HDFStore and get a natural unique index?

Question

I\'m importing large amounts of http logs (80GB+) into a Pandas HDFStore for statistical processing. Even within a single import file I need to batch the content as I load i

Answer 1

You can do it like this. Only trick is that the first time the store table doesn't exist, so get_storer will raise.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import os

files = ['test1.csv','test2.csv']
for f in files:
    pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(10,2),columns=list('AB')).to_csv(f)

path = 'test.h5'
if os.path.exists(path):
    os.remove(path)

with pd.get_store(path) as store:
    for f in files:
        df = pd.read_csv(f,index_col=0)
        try:
            nrows = store.get_storer('foo').nrows
        except:
            nrows = 0

        df.index = pd.Series(df.index) + nrows
        store.append('foo',df)


In [10]: pd.read_hdf('test.h5','foo')
Out[10]: 
           A         B
0   0.772017  0.153381
1   0.304131  0.368573
2   0.995465  0.799655
3  -0.326959  0.923280
4  -0.808376  0.449645
5  -1.336166  0.236968
6  -0.593523 -0.359080
7  -0.098482  0.037183
8   0.315627 -1.027162
9  -1.084545 -1.922288
10  0.412407 -0.270916
11  1.835381 -0.737411
12 -0.607571  0.507790
13  0.043509 -0.294086
14 -0.465210  0.880798
15  1.181344  0.354411
16  0.501892 -0.358361
17  0.633256  0.419397
18  0.932354 -0.603932
19 -0.341135  2.453220

You actually don't necessarily need a global unique index, (unless you want one) as HDFStore (through PyTables) provides one by uniquely numbering rows. You can always add these selection parameters.

In [11]: pd.read_hdf('test.h5','foo',start=12,stop=15)
Out[11]: 
           A         B
12 -0.607571  0.507790
13  0.043509 -0.294086
14 -0.465210  0.880798