Apache Arrow

Powering In-Memory Analytics

Apache Arrow is a development platform for in-memory analytics. It contains a set of technologies that enable big data systems to process and move data fast.

Major components of the project include:

• The Arrow Columnar In-Memory Format
• 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
• Plasma Object Store: a shared-memory blob store, part of the C++ codebase
• 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 a number of 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

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 JIRA
• Learn the format
• Contribute code to one of the reference implementations