the `driver` option to the PyTables open_file method through **kwargs, the HDF5 file is loaded or created in-memory and will only be written when closed: >>> bar = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(10, 4)) >>> store = pd.HDFStore('test.h5', driver='H5FD_CORE') >>> store['foo'] = bar >>> store.close() # only now, data is written to disk z