TPC-H Data Generator CLI

tpchgen-cli is a high-performance, parallel command line interface for generating TPC-H data.

Note: See tpcgen-cli to create both TPC-H and TPC-DS data and the tpcgen-rs project for the full project details.

This tool is more than 10x faster than the next fastest TPCH generator we know of (duckdb). On a 2023 Mac M3 Max laptop, it easily generates data faster than can be written to SSD. See BENCHMARKS.md for more details on performance and benchmarking.

Try with uvx

uvx tpchgen-cli parquet -s 1 --output-dir /tmp/tpch

Install with pip

python -m pip install tpchgen-cli

Install via Rust

Install Rust and compile

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
RUSTFLAGS='-C target-cpu=native' cargo install --locked tpchgen-cli

Then generate TPC-H data:

tpchgen-cli parquet -s 1 --output-dir /tmp/tpch

Examples

# Scale Factor 10, all tables, in Apache Parquet format in the current directory
# (3.6GB, 8 files, 60M lineitem rows, in 5 seconds on a modern laptop)
tpchgen-cli parquet -s 10

# Scale Factor 10, all tables, in `tbl`(csv like) format in the `sf10` directory
# (10GB, 8 files, 60M lineitem rows)
# Note: `tpchgen-cli tbl` also works explicitly
tpchgen-cli -s 10 --output-dir sf10

# Scale Factor 1000, lineitem table, in Apache Parquet format in sf1000 directory,
# 20 part(itions), 100MB row groups
# (220GB, 20 files, 6B lineitem rows, 3.5 minutes on a modern laptop)
tpchgen-cli parquet -s 1000 --tables lineitem --parts 20 --row-group-bytes=100MB --output-dir sf1000

# Per-column encodings (overrides Parquet writer defaults for named columns)
tpchgen-cli parquet -s 1 --tables lineitem --column-encoding=l_comment=DELTA_LENGTH_BYTE_ARRAY,l_shipinstruct=DELTA_LENGTH_BYTE_ARRAY

# Scale Factor 10, partition 2 and 3 of 10 in partitioned directory
#
# partitioned/
# ├── lineitem
# │   ├── lineitem.2.tbl
# │   └── lineitem.3.tbl
# └── orders
#    ├── orders.2.tbl
#    └── orders.3.tbl
#
for PART in `seq 2 3`; do
  tpchgen-cli --tables lineitem,orders --scale-factor=10 --output-dir partitioned --parts 10 --part $PART
done

By default tpchgen-cli shows a per-table progress bar on stderr while data is generated. Pass --no-progress to disable it (it is also disabled automatically when --quiet is set, when --stdout is used, or when stderr is not a terminal, e.g. in CI logs).

Performance

Times to create TPCH tables in Parquet format using tpchgen-cli and duckdb for various scale factors.

• DuckDB (proprietary) is the time required to create TPCH data using the proprietary DuckDB format
• Creating Scale Factor 1000 using DuckDB required 647 GB of memory, which is why it is not included in the table above.

More information

• Watch this demo by @alamb to see tpchgen-cli in action
• Read the companion blog post in the DataFusion blog to learn about the project's history

References

• The TPC-H Specification, see the specification page.
• The Original dbgen Implementation you must submit an official request to access the software dbgen at their official website