ORC (Optimized Row Columnar) is Parquet 129 's sibling from the Hive 129 world: Hortonworks announced it with Facebook in February 2013 to speed up Hive. The current release is ORC 2.3.1 (16 July 2026, Apache 2.0, github.com/apache/orc (https://github.com/apache/orc 769 )); pyarrow 129 bundles the ORC C++ writer.