Summary
If you need to transport data from one place to another, you should consider Arrow Flight as a possible solution for your server. Even without taking advantage of the parallelism it provides, it still shows that it is a significant improvement over most current ways to transport tabular data. Because it leverages Arrow’s IPC format, it gains the benefits of avoiding serialization and deserialization costs. While it is currently built on gRPC using HTTP/2, there are many proposals to enable it to more easily support other networking configurations that may get traction.
During the course of this chapter, if you followed along, you created some simple Flight servers and clients. Let those serve as boilerplates for you. Build on them. Add more functionality to them. Explore the features and abilities that Flight provides and supports. If you work more on the data science side than on the developer side, try using Flight as a client to fetch data from engines such as...