Write-once read-many data sets using Berkeley DB.
Project description
Wormtable is a write-once read-many table for large scale datasets. It provides Python programmers with a simple and efficient method of storing, processing and searching datasets of essentially unlimited size. A wormtable consists of a set of rows, each of which contains values belonging to a fixed number of columns. Rows are encoded in a custom binary format, designed to be flexible, compact and portable. These rows are then stored on disc using Berkeley DB, a highly respected embedded database toolkit. Wormtable also supports efficient searching and retrieval of rows with particular values through the use of indexes.
The Variant Call Format (VCF) is supported directly by wormtable through a command line conversion program, vcf2wt. There is also a command line utility wtadmin to manage wormtables, including the ability to dump values and add, remove and view indexes.
Documentation
Full documentation for wormtable is available at http://jeromekelleher.github.io/wormtable.
Installation
Quick install for Debian/Ubuntu
If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, this should get you up and running quickly:
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev libdb-dev $ sudo pip install wormtable
For Python 3, use python3-dev and pip3.
General instructions
Once Berkeley DB has been installed (see below) we can build the wormtable module using the standard Python methods. For example, using pip we have
$ sudo pip install wormtable
Or, we can manually download the package, unpack it and then run:
$ python setup.py build $ sudo python setup.py install
Most of the time this will compile and install the module without difficulty.
It is also possible to download the latest development version of wormtable from github.
Python 2.6/3.1
Wormtable requires the argparse package, which was introduced to the standard library for version 3.2 (it is also included in 2.7). For users of older Python versions, the argparse module must be installed for the command line utilities to work:
$ sudo pip install argparse
This is not necessary for recent versions of Python.
Installing Berkeley DB
Wormtable requires Berkeley DB, which is available for all major platforms. Any recent version of Berkeley DB should work, but the various versions have not been tested extensively. Development and testing have been carried out primarily on the DB 4.x series.
Linux
Installing Berkeley DB is very easy on Linux distributions.
On Debian/Ubuntu use:
$ sudo apt-get install libdb-dev
and on Red Hat/Fedora use:
# yum install db4-devel
Other distributions and package managers should provide a similarly easy option to install the DB development files.
Mac OS X
Berkeley DB can be installed from source on a mac, via macports or homebrew.
For MacPorts, to install e.g. v5.3
$ sudo port install db53
for more details of Berkely DB versions, see here: https://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=category&substr=databases
Assuming Berkeley DB is installed with macports then we need to set the CFLAGS and LDFLAGS environment variables to use the headers and libraries in /opt:
$ CFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include/db53 LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib/db53/ python setup.py build $ sudo python setup.py install
Other Platforms
On platforms that Berkeley DB is not available as part of the native packaging system (or DB was installed locally because of non-root access) there can be issues with finding the correct headers and libraries when compiling wormtable. For example, if we add the DB 4.8 package using:
# pkg_add -r db48
we get the following errors when we try to install wormtable:
$ python setup.py build ... [Messages cut for brevity] ... _wormtablemodule.c:3727: error: 'DB_NEXT_NODUP' undeclared (first use in this function) _wormtablemodule.c:3733: error: 'DB_NOTFOUND' undeclared (first use in this function) _wormtablemodule.c:3739: error: 'DistinctValueIterator' has no member named 'cursor' _wormtablemodule.c:3739: error: 'DistinctValueIterator' has no member named 'cursor' _wormtablemodule.c:3740: error: 'DistinctValueIterator' has no member named 'cursor' error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1
This is because the compiler does not know where to find the headers and library files for Berkeley DB. To remedy this we must set the LDFLAGS and CFLAGS environment variables to their correct values. Unfortunately there is no simple method to do this and some knowledge of where your system keeps headers and libraries is needed. To complete the installation for the FreeBSD example above, we can do the following:
$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/db48 LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib/db48 python setup.py build $ sudo python setup.py install
Test suite
Wormtable has an extensive suite of tests to ensure that data is stored correctly. It is a good idea to run these immediately after installation:
$ python tests.py
Tested platforms
Wormtable is higly portable, and has been successfully built and tested on the following platforms:
Operating system |
Platform |
Python |
Compiler |
---|---|---|---|
Ubuntu 13.04 |
x86-64 |
2.7.4 |
gcc 4.7.3 |
Ubuntu 13.04 |
x86-64 |
3.3.1 |
gcc 4.7.3 |
Ubuntu 13.04 |
x86-64 |
2.7.4 |
clang 3.2.1 |
Debian squeeze |
x86-64 |
2.6.6 |
gcc 4.4.5 |
Debian squeeze |
x86-64 |
3.1.3 |
gcc 4.4.5 |
Debian squeeze |
x86-64 |
3.1.3 |
clang 1.1 |
Debian squeeze |
ppc64 |
2.6.6 |
gcc 4.4.5 |
Debian squeeze |
ppc64 |
3.1.3 |
gcc 4.4.5 |
Debian squeeze |
ppc64 |
3.1.3 |
clang 1.1 |
Debian wheezy |
armv6l |
2.7.3 |
gcc 4.6.3 |
Fedora 17 |
i386 |
2.7.3 |
gcc 4.7.2 |
Fedora 17 |
i386 |
3.2.3 |
gcc 4.7.2 |
FreeBSD 9.0 |
i386 |
3.2.2 |
gcc 4.2.2 |
FreeBSD 9.0 |
i386 |
2.7.2 |
gcc 4.2.2 |
FreeBSD 9.0 |
i386 |
3.1.4 |
clang 3.0 |
OS X 10.8.4 |
x86-64 |
2.7.2 |
clang 4.2 |
SunOS 5.10 |
SPARC |
3.3.2 |
gcc 4.8.0 |
Project details
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
Download files
Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.