oneDAL provides interfaces for serialization and deserialization of data objects, which are an essential technique for data exchange between devices and for implementing data recovery mechanisms on a device failure.

The InputDataArchive class provides interfaces for creation of a serialized object archive. The OutputDataArchive class provides interfaces for deserialization of an object from the archive. To reduce network traffic, memory, or persistent storage footprint, you can compress data objects during serialization and decompress them back during deserialization. To this end, provide Compressor and Decompressor objects as arguments for InputDataArchive and OutputDataArchive constructors respectively. For details of compression and decompression, see Data Compression.

A general structure of an archive is as follows:

Headers and footers contain information required to reconstruct the archived object.

All serializable objects, such as numeric tables, a data dictionary, and models, have serialization and deserialization methods. These methods take input archive and output archive, respectively, as method parameters.