Powering In-Memory Analytics
Apache Arrow is a universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics. It contains a set of technologies that enable data systems to efficiently store, process, and move data.
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 main.
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: