Owen O'Malley

Cofounder, Cloudera

Search every verified Owen O'Malley interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Owen O'Malley, cofounder of Cloudera, discussed the Apache ORC project in a December 2018 interview at the Apache roadshow in Berlin. He described ORC as a columnar file format designed for high-speed access in large-scale data workloads, primarily used by big data projects like Hive and Spark. He explained that columnar storage improves compression and enables efficient predicate pushdown, allowing queries to skip irrelevant data, and noted ongoing work on column-level encryption to protect sensitive information such as personally identifiable data. O'Malley also reflected on challenges during the project's development, including the process of extracting ORC from Hive into a standalone project. He acknowledged a mistake in renaming the module to org.apache.orc while it was still part of Hive, which caused complications in releases. He described creating a tool to analyze Java bytecode dependencies to manage the project's large class count, ultimately breaking dependency chains by releasing a separate storage API package. He advised caution with dependency management, specifically avoiding loops, and encouraged community participation in the project.