Book Image

In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow

By : Matthew Topol
Book Image

In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow

By: Matthew Topol

Overview of this book

Apache Arrow is designed to accelerate analytics and allow the exchange of data across big data systems easily. In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow begins with a quick overview of the Apache Arrow format, before moving on to helping you to understand Arrow’s versatility and benefits as you walk through a variety of real-world use cases. You'll cover key tasks such as enhancing data science workflows with Arrow, using Arrow and Apache Parquet with Apache Spark and Jupyter for better performance and hassle-free data translation, as well as working with Perspective, an open source interactive graphical and tabular analysis tool for browsers. As you advance, you'll explore the different data interchange and storage formats and become well-versed with the relationships between Arrow, Parquet, Feather, Protobuf, Flatbuffers, JSON, and CSV. In addition to understanding the basic structure of the Arrow Flight and Flight SQL protocols, you'll learn about Dremio’s usage of Apache Arrow to enhance SQL analytics and discover how Arrow can be used in web-based browser apps. Finally, you'll get to grips with the upcoming features of Arrow to help you stay ahead of the curve. By the end of this book, you will have all the building blocks to create useful, efficient, and powerful analytical services and utilities with Apache Arrow.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Overview of What Arrow Is, its Capabilities, Benefits, and Goals
5
Section 2: Interoperability with Arrow: pandas, Parquet, Flight, and Datasets
11
Section 3: Real-World Examples, Use Cases, and Future Development

What is Flight SQL?

We've talked about Arrow Flight a lot in this chapter so far and learned how to create a simple Flight client and server. Back in Chapter 3, Data Science with Apache Arrow, we also talked about ODBC and JDBC as the standard way to connect to most databases currently. If you haven't guessed yet, that something better I was alluding to there was indeed Arrow Flight! Before we get into it, let's have a quick refresher on what ODBC and JDBC are.

ODBC and JDBC were created in 1992 and 1997, respectively, as a technology to help databases expose a common API. By creating a common abstraction layer that all database vendors could implement a driver for, application developers could simply build code to use this common interface with databases. They wouldn't have to create custom/bespoke objects for all the different database software they wanted to use. These technologies quickly became the de facto standard in the enterprise world, and then the...