Chapter 4: Format and Memory Handling

I've continuously extolled the virtues of using Arrow as a data interchange technology for tabular data, but how does it stack up against the more common technologies that people tend to utilize for transferring data? When does it make sense to use one over the other for your application programming interface (API)? The answer is to know how different technologies utilize memory. Clever management of your memory can be the key to performant processes. To decide which format to use for your data, you need to understand which use cases your options were designed for. With that in mind, you can take advantage of the runtime properties of the most common data transport formats such as Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and FlatBuffers when appropriate. By understanding how to utilize memory in your program, you can process very large amounts of data with minimal memory overhead.

We're going to cover the following...