PyTables User's Guide: Hierarchical datasets in Python - Release 1.3.3
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# 2.2. Binary installation (Windows)

This section is intended for installing precompiled binaries on Windows platforms. You may also find it useful for instructions on how to install binary prerequisites even if you want to compile `PyTables` itself on Windows.

## 2.2.1. Windows prerequisites

First, make sure that you have Python 2.3, 2.4 or higher (Python 2.2 is unsupported), HDF5 1.6.5 or higher and numarray 1.5.0 or higher installed (I have built the `PyTables` binaries using HDF5 1.6.5 and numarray 1.5.1).

For the HDF5 library it should be enough to manually copy the `hdf5dll.dll`, `zlib1.dll` and `szipdll.dll` files to a directory in your `PATH` environment variable (for example `C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32`) or `python_installation_path\Lib\site-packages\tables` (the last directory may have not exist yet, so if you want to install the DLLs there, you should do so after installing the PyTables package).

Caveat: When downloading the binary distribution for HDF5 libraries, select one compiled with MSVC 6.0 if you are using Python 2.3.x, such as the package `5-165-win.zip`. The file `5-165-win-net.zip` was compiled with the MSVC 7.1 (aka "`.NET 2003`") and you must choose if you want to run PyTables with Python 2.4.x series. You have been warned!

To enable compression with optional LZO or bzip2 libraries (see the section 5.3 for hints about how they may be used to improve performance), fetch and install the `LZO` (choose v1.x, `LZO` v2.x is not supported in precompiled Windows builds) and `bzip2` binaries from [][1]. Normally, you will only need to fetch and install the `<package>-<version>-bin.zip` file and copy the `lzo1.dll` or `bzip2.dll` files in a directory in the `PATH` environment variable, or in `python_installation_path\Lib\site-packages\tables` (the last directory may have not exist yet, so if you want to install the DLLs there, you should do so after installing the PyTables package), so that they can be found by the PyTables extensions.

Please, note that PyTables has internal machinery for dealing with uninstalled optional compression libraries, so, you don't need to install any of LZO or bzip2 dynamic libraries if you don't want to.

## 2.2.2. PyTables package installation

Download the `tables-<version>.win32-py<version>.exe` file and execute it.

You can (you should) test your installation by unpacking the source tar-ball, changing to the `tables/tests/` subdirectory and executing the `test_all.py` script. If all the tests pass (possibly with a few warnings, related to the potential unavailability of LZO or bzip2 libs) you already have a working, well-tested copy of `PyTables` installed! If any test fails, please try to locate which test module is failing and execute:

    	      python test_<module>.py -v verbose

and also:

    	      python test_all.py --show-versions

and mail the output to the developers so that the problem can be fixed in future releases.

You can proceed now to the next chapter to see how to use `PyTables`.

### Notes

[1] | Note that support for the UCL compressor has been declared deprecated and has not been added in the binary build of PyTables for Windows.

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