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

Chapter 3: Data Science with Apache Arrow

So far, we've covered the Apache Arrow format and how to read various types of data from local disks or cloud storage into Arrow-formatted memory, but if you aren't the one actually building tools and utilities for others to use, then what does this mean for you? You'll be able to benefit from things that people will build using Arrow, such as new fancy libraries, performance enhancements, and utilities. But, how can you materially change your workflow to get some of these improvements right now? That's what we're going to be covering in this chapter, specific examples of Arrow enhancing existing data science workflows and enabling new ones.

In this chapter, we'll look at the following topics:

  • How Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is being improved upon and will eventually, hopefully, be rendered obsolete by Arrow communication protocols
  • Leveraging the topics we covered in the previous chapters with...