csharp/README.md

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# Apache Arrow

An implementation of Arrow targeting .NET Standard.

This implementation is under development and may not be suitable for use in production environments.

# Implementation

- Arrow 0.11 (specification)
- C# 7.2
- .NET Standard 1.3
- Asynchronous I/O
- Uses modern .NET runtime features such as **Span&lt;T&gt;**, **Memory&lt;T&gt;**, **MemoryManager&lt;T&gt;**, and **System.Buffers** primitives for memory allocation, memory storage, and fast serialization.
- Uses **Acyclic Visitor Pattern** for array types and arrays to facilitate serialization, record batch traversal, and format growth.

# Known Issues

- Can not read Arrow files containing dictionary batches, tensors, or tables.
- Can not easily modify allocation strategy without implementing a custom memory pool. All allocations are currently 64-byte aligned and padded to 8-bytes.
- Default memory allocation strategy uses an over-allocation strategy with pointer fixing, which results in significant memory overhead for small buffers. A buffer that requires a single byte for storage may be backed by an allocation of up to 64-bytes to satisfy alignment requirements.
- There are currently few builder APIs available for specific array types. Arrays must be built manually with an arrow buffer builder abstraction.
- FlatBuffer code generation is not included in the build process.
- Serialization implementation does not perform exhaustive validation checks during deserialization in every scenario.
- Throws exceptions with vague, inconsistent, or non-localized messages in many situations
- Throws exceptions that are non-specific to the Arrow implementation in some circumstances where it probably should (eg. does not throw ArrowException exceptions)
- Lack of code documentation
- Lack of usage examples
- Lack of comprehensive unit tests
- Lack of comprehensive benchmarks

# Usage

	using System.Diagnostics;
	using System.IO;
	using System.Threading.Tasks;
	using Apache.Arrow;
	using Apache.Arrow.Ipc;

    public static async Task<RecordBatch> ReadArrowAsync(string filename)
    {
        using (var stream = File.OpenRead("test.arrow"))
        using (var reader = new ArrowFileReader(stream))
        {
            var recordBatch = await reader.ReadNextRecordBatchAsync();
            Debug.WriteLine("Read record batch with {0} column(s)", recordBatch.ColumnCount);
            return recordBatch;
        }
    }


# Status

## Memory Management

- Allocations are 64-byte aligned and padded to 8-bytes.
- Allocations are automatically garbage collected

## Arrays

### Primitive Types

- Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64
- UInt8, UInt16, UInt32, UInt64
- Float, Double
- Binary (variable-length)
- String (utf-8)
- Null

### Parametric Types

- Timestamp
- Date32
- Date64
- Decimal
- Time32
- Time64
- Binary (fixed-length)
- List
- Struct

### Type Metadata

- Data Types
- Fields
- Schema

### Serialization

- File
- Stream

## Not Implemented

- Serialization
    - Exhaustive validation
    - Dictionary Batch
        - Can not serialize or deserialize files or streams containing dictionary batches
    - Dictionary Encoding
	- Schema Metadata
	- Schema Field Metadata
- Types
    - Tensor
    - Table
- Arrays
    - Union
        - Dense
        - Sparse
    - Half-Float
    - Dictionary
- Array Operations
	- Equality / Comparison
	- Casting
	- Builders
- Compute
    - There is currently no API available for a compute / kernel abstraction.

# Build

Install the latest `.NET Core SDK` from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download.

    dotnet build

## NuGet Build

To build the NuGet package run the following command to build a debug flavor, preview package into the **artifacts** folder.

    dotnet pack

When building the officially released version run: (see Note below about current `git` repository)

    dotnet pack -c Release

Which will build the final/stable package.

NOTE: When building the officially released version, ensure that your `git` repository has the `origin` remote set to `https://github.com/apache/arrow.git`, which will ensure Source Link is set correctly. See https://github.com/dotnet/sourcelink/blob/master/docs/README.md for more information.

There are two output artifacts:
1. `Apache.Arrow.<version>.nupkg` - this contains the executable assemblies
2. `Apache.Arrow.<version>.snupkg` - this contains the debug symbols files

Both of these artifacts can then be uploaded to https://www.nuget.org/packages/manage/upload.

## Docker Build

Build from the Apache Arrow project root.

    docker build -f csharp/build/docker/Dockerfile .

## Testing

	dotnet test

All build artifacts are placed in the **artifacts** folder in the project root.

# Coding Style

This project follows the coding style specified in [Coding Style](https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/master/docs/coding-guidelines/coding-style.md).

# Updating FlatBuffers code

See https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/flatbuffers_guide_use_java_c-sharp.html for how to get the `flatc` executable.

Run `flatc --csharp` on each `.fbs` file in the [format](../format) folder. And replace the checked in `.cs` files under [FlatBuf](src/Apache.Arrow/Flatbuf) with the generated files.

Update the non-generated [FlatBuffers](src/Apache.Arrow/Flatbuf/FlatBuffers) `.cs` files with the files from the [google/flatbuffers repo](https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/tree/master/net/FlatBuffers).