Apache Arrow

Powering In-Memory Analytics

Apache Arrow is a universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics. It contains a set of technologies that enable data systems to efficiently store, process, and move data.

Major components of the project include:

• The Arrow Columnar In-Memory Format: a standard and efficient in-memory representation of various datatypes, plain or nested
• The Arrow IPC Format: an efficient serialization of the Arrow format and associated metadata, for communication between processes and heterogeneous environments
• The Arrow Flight RPC protocol: based on the Arrow IPC format, a building block for remote services exchanging Arrow data with application-defined semantics (for example a storage server or a database)
• C++ libraries
• C bindings using GLib
• C# .NET libraries
• Gandiva: an LLVM-based Arrow expression compiler, part of the C++ codebase
• Go libraries
• Java libraries
• JavaScript libraries
• Python libraries
• R libraries
• Ruby libraries
• Rust libraries

Arrow is an Apache Software Foundation project. Learn more at arrow.apache.org.

What’s in the Arrow libraries?

The reference Arrow libraries contain many distinct software components:

• Columnar vector and table-like containers (similar to data frames) supporting flat or nested types
• Fast, language agnostic metadata messaging layer (using Google’s Flatbuffers library)
• Reference-counted off-heap buffer memory management, for zero-copy memory sharing and handling memory-mapped files
• IO interfaces to local and remote filesystems
• Self-describing binary wire formats (streaming and batch/file-like) for remote procedure calls (RPC) and interprocess communication (IPC)
• Integration tests for verifying binary compatibility between the implementations (e.g. sending data from Java to C++)
• Conversions to and from other in-memory data structures
• Readers and writers for various widely-used file formats (such as Parquet, CSV)

Implementation status

The official Arrow libraries in this repository are in different stages of implementing the Arrow format and related features. See our current feature matrix on git main.

How to Contribute

Please read our latest project contribution guide.

Getting involved

Even if you do not plan to contribute to Apache Arrow itself or Arrow integrations in other projects, we’d be happy to have you involved:

• Join the mailing list: send an email to dev-subscribe@arrow.apache.org. Share your ideas and use cases for the project.
• Follow our activity on GitHub issues
• Learn the format
• Contribute code to one of the reference implementations