arrow2 VS arrow-rs

One of the interesting components of Polars that I've been watching is the use of the Apache Arrow memory format, which is a standard layout for data in memory that enables processing (querying, iterating, calculating, etc) in a language agnostic way, in particular without having to copy/convert it into the local object format first. This enables cross-language data access by mmaping or transferring a single buffer, with zero [de]serialization overhead.

For some history, there's has been a bit of contention between the official arrow-rs implementation and the arrow2 implementation created by the polars team which includes some extra features that they find important. I think the current status is that everyone agrees that having two crates that implement the same standard is not ideal, and they are working to port any necessary features to the arrow-rs crate and plan on eventually switching to it and deprecating arrow2. But that's not easy.

https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1176

https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2/pull/1476

https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2 https://github.com/apache/arrow-datafusion https://github.com/apache/arrow-ballista https://github.com/pola-rs/polars https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb

Currently datafusion and polars aren't directly operable iirc because they use different underlying arrows implementations, but there seems to be work being done on that here https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2/issues/1429

[arrow2](https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2) and [parquet2](https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/parquet2) are great foundational libraries for and DataFrame libs in Rust.

[1] https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2

In lockstep with arrow2's 0.13 release, we have published polars 0.23.0.

This is so freaking life-saving! - we have been using StreamingIterator and FallibleStreamingIterator in libraries (arrow2 and parquet2) and the existing landscape is quite confusing for new users!

arrow2 has support for mssql via ODBC (which microsoft has first class support to). Here are the integration tests we have (both read and write) against mssql specifically.

https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark

Apache/arrow-rs: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs

From https://arrow.apache.org/faq/ :

> How does Arrow relate to Flatbuffers?

> Flatbuffers is a low-level building block for binary data serialization. It is not adapted to the representation of large, structured, homogenous data, and does not sit at the right abstraction layer for data analysis tasks.

> Arrow is a data layer aimed directly at the needs of data analysis, providing a comprehensive collection of data types required to analytics, built-in support for “null” values (representing missing data), and an expanding toolbox of I/O and computing facilities.

> The Arrow file format does use Flatbuffers under the hood to serialize schemas and other metadata needed to implement the Arrow binary IPC protocol, but the Arrow data format uses its own representation for optimal access and computation

One of the interesting components of Polars that I've been watching is the use of the Apache Arrow memory format, which is a standard layout for data in memory that enables processing (querying, iterating, calculating, etc) in a language agnostic way, in particular without having to copy/convert it into the local object format first. This enables cross-language data access by mmaping or transferring a single buffer, with zero [de]serialization overhead.

For some history, there's has been a bit of contention between the official arrow-rs implementation and the arrow2 implementation created by the polars team which includes some extra features that they find important. I think the current status is that everyone agrees that having two crates that implement the same standard is not ideal, and they are working to port any necessary features to the arrow-rs crate and plan on eventually switching to it and deprecating arrow2. But that's not easy.

https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1176

https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2/pull/1476

It's built around the arrow-rs library, which we've contributed to significantly: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs

For loading Parquet in memory, probably worth a look at arrow-rs.

From what I've seen, most of the Rust community seems to be adopting Apache Arrow as the go-to for data processing. It has strong community support and good interoperability with many cross-language tools. It is natively a columnar format. If row-oriented is a must for your use case, consider looking into alternatives like gRPC that might better suit your needs.

That matrix doesn't seem up to date. For example looking at the rust crate it does seem to support things like map, float16, and IPC. The changelog shows an impressive development pace.

Oh, and for anyone interested in pitching in on the Rust implementation, there's an issue logged here along with some discussion: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1323

There is more discussion about the decision here: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1120

I'm still not sure how this differs from https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs. What does transmute even mean?