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 5: Crossing the Language Barrier with the Arrow C Data API

Not to sound like a broken record, but I've said several times already that Apache Arrow is a collection of libraries rather than one single library. This is an important distinction from both a technical standpoint and a logistical one. From a technical standpoint, it means that third-party projects that depend on Arrow don't need to use the entirety of the project and instead can only link against, embed, or otherwise include the portions of the project they need. This allows for smaller binaries and a smaller surface area of dependencies. From a logistical standpoint, it allows the Arrow project to pivot easily and move in potentially experimental directions without making large, project-wide changes.

As the goal of the Arrow project is to create a collection of tools and libraries that can be shared across the data analytics and data science ecosystems with a shared in-memory representation, there are...