Apache Arrow

Build Status

Powering Columnar In-Memory Analytics

Arrow is a set of technologies that enable big-data systems to process and move data fast.

Initial implementations include:

• The Arrow Format
• Java implementation
• C++ implementation
• Python interface to C++ libraries

Arrow is an Apache Software Foundation project. Learn more at arrow.apache.org.

What's in the Arrow libraries?

The reference Arrow implementations contain a number of 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
• Low-overhead IO interfaces to files on disk, HDFS (C++ only)
• 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 (e.g. Python's pandas library)

Getting involved

Right now the primary audience for Apache Arrow are the developers of data systems; most people will use Apache Arrow indirectly through systems that use it for internal data handling and interoperating with other Arrow-enabled systems.

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:

• Join the mailing list: send an email to [email protected]. Share your ideas and use cases for the project.
• Follow our activity on JIRA
• Learn the format
• Contribute code to one of the reference implementations