Apache Arrow

Columnar in-memory zero-copy interop.

Definition

Arrow IPC format for inter-process transfer. Arrow Flight (gRPC) and Arrow Flight SQL (data services) for high-throughput remote transfer. Backbone of Polars, DuckDB, BigQuery Storage API, Snowflake (Snowpark Native).

Origin

Apache top-level project February 2016 ; v1.0 released July 2020 ; v18.1 current (2025).

Example in context

Polars (Rust) loads 100M Parquet rows into Arrow memory and passes them zero-copy to pandas.

Related terms

• Parquet — on-disk twin.