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

Finishing up with style!

Before we wrap this chapter up, I'd be remiss if I didn't broach one last topic – code style!

To avoid wars and arguments about most aspects of code style, most of the implementations of the Arrow library have very well-defined style checking and linting rules. These rules are checked using the automated CI checks that we covered and are required to pass, in order to merge a PR. We're not going to spend a ton of time on this, since this is enforced and automated with tooling, but it's good to know what tooling is in use.

C++ styling

Arrow follows Google's C++ style guide (https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html) with a few exceptions:

  • Line length is relaxed to 90 characters.
  • The NULLPTR macro is used in header files, rather than nullptr, for wider C++ version build support.
  • There are relaxed rules regarding structs for convenience.

The style is enforced using the clang-format and clang...