Apache Arrow VS h5py

Compare Apache Arrow vs h5py and see what are their differences.

Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow is a multi-language toolbox for accelerated data interchange and in-memory processing (by apache)

h5py

HDF5 for Python -- The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format. (by h5py)
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Apache Arrow h5py
75 5
13,480 1,996
2.2% 0.9%
10.0 8.6
4 days ago 8 days ago
C++ Python
Apache License 2.0 BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Apache Arrow

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Arrow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-05.
  • How moving from Pandas to Polars made me write better code without writing better code
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    In comes Polars: a brand new dataframe library, or how the author Ritchie Vink describes it... a query engine with a dataframe frontend. Polars is built on top of the Arrow memory format and is written in Rust, which is a modern performant and memory-safe systems programming language similar to C/C++.
  • From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    I learned yesterday about GoLang's assembler https://go.dev/doc/asm - after browsing how arrow is implemented for different languages (my experience is mainly C/C++) - https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/go/arrow/math - there are bunch of .S ("asm" files) and I'm still not able to comprehend how these work exactly (I guess it'll take more reading) - it seems very peculiar.

    The last time I've used inlined assembly was back in Turbo/Borland Pascal, then bit in Visual Studio (32-bit), until they got disabled. Then did very little gcc with their more strict specification (while the former you had to know how the ABI worked, the latter too - but it was specced out).

    Anyway - I wasn't expecting to find this in "Go" :) But I guess you can always start with .go code then produce assembly (-S) then optimize it, or find/hire someone to do it.

  • Time Series Analysis with Polars
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Dec 2023
    One is related to the heritage of being built around the NumPy library, which is great for processing numerical data, but becomes an issue as soon as the data is anything else. Pandas 2.0 has started to bring in Arrow, but it's not yet the standard (you have to opt-in and according to the developers it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future). Also, pandas's Arrow-based features are not yet entirely on par with its NumPy-based features. Polars was built around Arrow from the get go. This makes it very powerful when it comes to exchanging data with other languages and reducing the number of in-memory copying operations, thus leading to better performance.
  • TXR Lisp
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    IMO a good first step would be to use the txr FFI to write a library for Apache arrow: https://arrow.apache.org/
  • 3D desktop Game Engine scriptable in Python
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
    https://www.reddit.com/r/O3DE/comments/rdvxhx/why_python/ :

    > Python is used for scripting the editor only, not in-game behaviors.

    > For implementing entity behaviors the only out of box ways are C++, ScriptCanvas (visual scripting) or Lua. Python is currently not available for implementing game logic.

    C++, Lua, and Python all implement CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) for remote function and method calls.

    "Using CFFI for embedding" https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/embedding.html :

    > You can use CFFI to generate C code which exports the API of your choice to any C application that wants to link with this C code. This API, which you define yourself, ends up as the API of a .so/.dll/.dylib library—or you can statically link it within a larger application.

    Apache Arrow already supports C, C++, Python, Rust, Go and has C GLib support Lua:

    https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/c_glib/example/lua :

    > Arrow Lua example: All example codes use LGI to use Arrow GLib based bindings

    pyarrow.from_numpy_dtype:

  • Show HN: Udsv.js – A faster CSV parser in 5KB (min)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2023
  • Interacting with Amazon S3 using AWS Data Wrangler (awswrangler) SDK for Pandas: A Comprehensive Guide
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Aug 2023
    AWS Data Wrangler is a Python library that simplifies the process of interacting with various AWS services, built on top of some useful data tools and open-source projects such as Pandas, Apache Arrow and Boto3. It offers streamlined functions to connect to, retrieve, transform, and load data from AWS services, with a strong focus on Amazon S3.
  • Cap'n Proto 1.0
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
    Worker should really adopt Apache Arrow, which has a much bigger ecosystem.

    https://github.com/apache/arrow

  • C++ Jobs - Q3 2023
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 4 Jul 2023
    Apache Arrow
  • Wheel fails for pyarrow installation
    1 project | /r/learnpython | 16 Jun 2023
    I am aware of the fact that there are other posts about this issue but none of the ideas to solve it worked for me or sometimes none were found. The issue was discussed in the wheel git hub last December and seems to be solved but then it seems like I'm installing the wrong version? I simply used pip3 install pyarrow, is that wrong?

h5py

Posts with mentions or reviews of h5py. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-09-26.
  • Working with data files too large for RAM
    1 project | /r/learnpython | 22 May 2023
    There's some good answers here, but another option I haven't seen suggested: Convert your txt file to HDF5 (Regardless if you follow my approach here, you should really consider converting your data to anything but a txt file). There's a nice library for working with it in python called h5py. The HDF format is designed specifically with working with very large sets of data (it even has compression options), often scientific in nature, but it's not a database. As far as how this fixes the specific issue you you've described, you can utilize numpy slicing to load one chunk your data at a time. Here's a stackoverflow answer which discusses a solution.
  • How to combine multiple numpy arrays stored on disk which are too big to fit in RAM?
    2 projects | /r/learnpython | 26 Sep 2022
    If it is a dataset, it should consist of individual instances. You could store these instances in separate files. Otherwise, HDF5 is a very convenient storage format. It allows random read/write access to elements of arrays stored on disk and has excellent Python support in form of the h5py package.
  • Is Python really this slow?
    2 projects | /r/learnpython | 11 Dec 2021
    If possible, try to monitor your memory usage during execution and if you see that you are consistently exceeding ~50% (my own rule of thumb, though you may want to discuss this with others as well) of what's available. If you are consistently using most of the available memory, then it's likely worth taking a moment to evaluate whether you can operate on subsets of the data from start to finish, and leave the rest of the data on disk until you are almost ready to use it. Tools like h5py are very helpful in these kinds of situations.
  • Python packages as API end points.
    1 project | /r/learnpython | 2 Mar 2021
    Yea - I really struggled with getting the correct version on h5py to work with both tensorflow and allenai nlp modules. May be its about finding the right version of libraries. Github Issue. I ended up using pickle to save stuff, like John who commented on 26/03/2020 on the same(closed) issue.
  • Tracing and visualizing the Python GIL with perf and VizTracer
    10 projects | dev.to | 14 Jan 2021
    Apply these to more issues, like in https://github.com/h5py/h5py/issues/1516

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Arrow and h5py you can also consider the following projects:

Airflow - Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows

Numba - NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM

Apache Spark - Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

gil_load - Utility for measuring the fraction of time the CPython GIL is held

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

viztracer - VizTracer is a low-overhead logging/debugging/profiling tool that can trace and visualize your python code execution.

polars - Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust

CPython - The Python programming language

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data

external-Merge-Sort - external Merge Sort in python.

beam - Apache Beam is a unified programming model for Batch and Streaming data processing.

per4m - Profiling and tracing information for Python using viztracer and perf, the GIL exposed.