Apache ORC (Optimized Row Columnar) is a free and open-source column-oriented data storage format. It is similar to the other columnar-storage file formats available in the Hadoop ecosystem such as RCFile and Parquet. It is used by most of the data processing frameworks Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache Flink and Apache Hadoop.
In February 2013, the Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format was announced by Hortonworks in collaboration with Facebook.
A month later, the Apache Parquet format was announced, developed by Cloudera and Twitter.