# h2oai/datatable

A Python package for manipulating 2-dimensional tabular data structures

Repository: https://github.com/h2oai/datatable
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/h2oai-datatable
Homepage: https://datatable.readthedocs.io
Language: C++
License: MPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: python, data-analysis, data-structure, performance, ftrl, fedramp
Last push: 2026-07-27T14:12:01+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 65/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:39:23.370411+00:00)
- activity 94, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3471, "days_push": 37, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1876, forks 164 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:47.734824+00:00)

## What it is
datatable is a Python package for manipulating 2-dimensional tabular data structures (data frames), inspired by R's data.table. It emphasizes speed and big-data support (up to ~100GB on a single node) with column-oriented storage and native C++ implementations for all datatypes including strings.

## Use cases
- manipulate large csv files faster than pandas
- process 100gb tabular datasets on a single machine
- feature engineering for machine learning pipelines
- read and write csv and jay files quickly
- filter, group, and join large data frames
- replace pandas for memory-efficient data wrangling
- train FTRL-proximal online models on wide datasets

## When to choose
- you need faster-than-pandas performance on large tabular data
- you work with datasets too big for pandas memory limits
- you want R data.table-like syntax in Python
- you need native string column handling for ML feature engineering

## When to avoid
- you need a rich ecosystem of integrations and community extensions
- your datasets are small and pandas is sufficient
- you rely on pandas-specific APIs or third-party libraries built on pandas
- you need distributed or multi-node processing

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: data-science, etl, csv, math
- domain: data-science, big-data, analytics, machine-learning
- platform: python, windows
- tags: dataframe, tabular-data, high-performance, column-oriented, big-data, pandas-alternative, data-table, ftrl, data-engineering, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- h2oai/datatable (main) score 65

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:47.734824+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:14:44.254061+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/h2oai/datatable (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:47.734824+00:00, sha 12f15398bf46)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.