Arrow

This is a pure Julia implementation of the Apache Arrow data standard. This package provides Julia AbstractVector objects for referencing data that conforms to the Arrow standard. This allows users to seamlessly interface Arrow formatted data with a great deal of existing Julia code.

Please see this document for a description of the Arrow memory layout.

Installation

The package can be installed by typing in the following in a Julia REPL:

julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add("Arrow")

or to use the official-apache code that follows the official apache release process, you can do:

julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/apache/arrow", subdir="julia/Arrow.jl")

Local Development

When developing on Arrow.jl it is recommended that you run the following to ensure that any changes to ArrowTypes.jl are immediately available to Arrow.jl without requiring a release:

julia --project -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.develop(path="src/ArrowTypes")'

Difference between this code and the apache/arrow/julia/Arrow repository

The code in the apache/arrow repository is officially part of the apache/arrow project and as such follows the regulated release cadence of the entire project, following standard community voting protocols. The JuliaData/Arrow.jl repository can be viewed as a sort of "dev" or "latest" branch of this code that may release more frequently, but without following official apache release guidelines. The two repositories are synced, however, so any bugfix patches in JuliaData will be upstreamed to apache/arrow for each release.

Format Support

This implementation supports the 1.0 version of the specification, including support for:

• All primitive data types
• All nested data types
• Dictionary encodings and messages
• Extension types
• Streaming, file, record batch, and replacement and isdelta dictionary messages

It currently doesn't include support for:

• Tensors or sparse tensors
• Flight RPC
• C data interface

Third-party data formats:

• CSV, parquet and avro support via the existing CSV.jl, Parquet.jl and Avro.jl packages
• Other Tables.jl-compatible packages automatically supported (DataFrames.jl, JSONTables.jl, JuliaDB.jl, SQLite.jl, MySQL.jl, JDBC.jl, ODBC.jl, XLSX.jl, etc.)
• No current Julia packages support ORC

See the full documentation for details on reading and writing arrow data.