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 6: Leveraging the Arrow Compute APIs

We're halfway through this book and only now are we covering actually performing analytical computations directly with Arrow. Kinda strange, right? At this point, if you've been following along, you should have a solid understanding of all the concepts you'll need to be able to benefit from the compute library.

The Arrow community is working toward building open source computation and query engines built on the Arrow format. To this end, the Arrow compute library exists to facilitate various high-performance implementations of functions that operate on Arrow-formatted data. This might be to perform logical casting from one data type to another, or it might be for performing large computation and filter operations, and everything in between. Rather than consumers having to implement operations over and over, high-performance implementations can be based on the Arrow format in a generic fashion and then used by many consumers...