Apache Arrow
Powering In-Memory Analytics
Apache Arrow is a development platform for in-memory analytics. It contains a
set of technologies that enable big data systems to process and move data fast.
Major components of the project include:
Arrow is an Apache Software Foundation project. Learn more at
arrow.apache.org.
What's in the Arrow libraries?
The reference Arrow libraries contain many distinct software components:
- Columnar vector and table-like containers (similar to data frames) supporting
flat or nested types
- Fast, language agnostic metadata messaging layer (using Google's Flatbuffers
library)
- Reference-counted off-heap buffer memory management, for zero-copy memory
sharing and handling memory-mapped files
- IO interfaces to local and remote filesystems
- Self-describing binary wire formats (streaming and batch/file-like) for
remote procedure calls (RPC) and interprocess communication (IPC)
- Integration tests for verifying binary compatibility between the
implementations (e.g. sending data from Java to C++)
- Conversions to and from other in-memory data structures
- Readers and writers for various widely-used file formats (such as Parquet, CSV)
Implementation status
The official Arrow libraries in this repository are in different stages of
implementing the Arrow format and related features. See our current
feature matrix
on git master.
How to Contribute
Please read our latest project contribution guide.
Getting involved
Even if you do not plan to contribute to Apache Arrow itself or Arrow
integrations in other projects, we'd be happy to have you involved: