Description
Geneticists and genomics scientists cannot natively get data from S3 when it's compressed using the most common format for that data type
Tabular data in genetics and genomics is often compressed using the so-called "tabix" format. This is a block compressed, gzip-compatible compression that allows indexing into a file by genome position. While the file suffixes are .gz
, and gunzip
can be used to decompress them from local files (via pandas.read_csv
with compression=gzip
) AWS data wrangler cannot fetch these data from S3 (by awswrangler.s3.read_csv
).
What I'd like to see
I'd like to be able to get data via awswrangler.s3.read_csv(S3_uri, compression="bgzip")
. While guzip
will decompress the file on local storage,bgzip -d
is actually the preferred method. I believe that subtle differences between gzip
and bgzip
corrupt the reading of the data from S3.
Alternatives
Transferring a file to local storage (aws s3 cp <uri> ./
) and then using the pandas read_csv
function works, but involves an extra copy step.
It is likely that the genomics community's use of bgzip
for tabix' files is idiosyncratic, but there is a large and growing number of users in this space.
Adding support for this compression method would support the genetics field and the biopharma industry.