Summary

For this foray into the Arrow libraries, we've explored the efficient sharing of data between libraries using the Arrow C data interface. Remember that the motivation for this interface was for zero-copy data sharing between components of the same running process. It's not intended for the C Data API itself to mimic the features available in higher-level languages such as C++ or Python – just to share data. In addition, if you're sharing between different processes or need persistent storage, you should be using the Arrow IPC format that we covered in Chapter 4, Format and Memory Handling.

At this point, we've covered lots of ways to read, write, and transfer Arrow data. But once you have the data in memory, you're going to want to perform operations on it and take advantage of the benefits of in-memory analytics. Rather than having to re-implement the mathematical and relational algorithms yourself, in Chapter 6, Leveraging the Arrow Compute...