Apache Arrow is a software development platform for building high
performance applications that process and transport large data
sets. It is designed to both improve the performance of analytical
algorithms and the efficiency of moving data from one system or
programming language to another. A critical component of Apache Arrow
is its in-memory columnar format, a standardized, language-agnostic
specification for representing structured, table-like datasets
in-memory. This data format has a rich data type system (included
nested and user-defined data types) designed to support the needs of
analytic database systems, data frame libraries, and more.