Implementation Status#

The following tables summarize the features available in the various official Arrow libraries. All libraries currently follow version 1.0.0 of the Arrow format, or later minor versions that are compatible with version 1.0.0. See Format Versioning and Stability for details about versioning. Unless otherwise stated, the Python, R, Ruby and C/GLib libraries follow the C++ Arrow library.

Data Types#

Data type (primitive)	C++	Java	Go	JS	C#	Rust	Julia	Swift	nanoarrow
Null	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Boolean	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Int8/16/32/64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
UInt8/16/32/64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Float16	✓	✓ (1)	✓	✓	✓ (2)	✓	✓		✓
Float32/64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Decimal32	✓		✓		✓
Decimal64	✓		✓		✓
Decimal128	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Decimal256	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Date32/64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Time32/64	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Timestamp	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Duration	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Interval	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓	✓		✓
Fixed Size Binary	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Binary	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Large Binary	✓	✓	✓	✓	(4)	✓	✓		✓
Utf8	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Large Utf8	✓	✓	✓	✓	(4)	✓	✓		✓
Binary View	✓		✓		✓	✓
Large Binary View	✓		✓
Utf8 View	✓		✓		✓	✓
Large Utf8 View	✓		✓

Data type (nested)	C++	Java	Go	JS	C#	Rust	Julia	nanoarrow
Fixed Size List	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
List	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Large List	✓	✓	✓		(4)	✓	✓	✓
List View	✓		✓		✓
Large List View	✓		✓
Struct	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Map	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Dense Union	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Sparse Union	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Data type (special)	C++	Java	Go	JS	C#	Rust	Julia	nanoarrow
Dictionary	✓	✓ (3)	✓	✓	✓	✓ (3)	✓	✓
Extension	✓	✓	✓			✓	✓	✓
Run-End Encoded	✓		✓

Canonical Extension types	C++	Java	Go
Fixed shape tensor	✓
Variable shape tensor
JSON	✓		✓
Opaque	✓	✓	✓
UUID	✓		✓
8-bit Boolean	✓		✓

Notes:

(1) Casting to/from Float16 in Java is not supported.
(2) Float16 support in C# is only available when targeting .NET 6+.
(3) Nested dictionaries not supported
(4) C# large array types are provided to help with interoperability with other libraries, but these do not support buffers larger than 2 GiB and an exception will be raised if trying to import an array that is too large.

See also

The Arrow Columnar Format and the Canonical Extension Types specification.

IPC Format#

IPC Feature	C++	Java	Go	JS	C#	Rust	Julia	Swift	nanoarrow
Arrow stream format	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓ (4)
Arrow file format	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Record batches	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Dictionaries	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Replacement dictionaries	✓	✓	✓				✓
Delta dictionaries	✓ (1)		✓ (1)	✓	✓		✓
Tensors	✓
Sparse tensors	✓
Buffer compression	✓	✓ (3)	✓		✓	✓	✓
Endianness conversion	✓ (2)		✓ (2)						✓ (2)
Custom schema metadata	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓

Notes:

(1) Delta dictionaries not supported on nested dictionaries
(2) Data with non-native endianness can be byte-swapped automatically when reading.
(3) LZ4 Codec currently is quite inefficient. ARROW-11901 tracks improving performance.
(4) The nanoarrow IPC implementation is only implemented for reading IPC streams.

Flight RPC#

Flight RPC Transport	C++	Java	Go	C#	Rust
gRPC transport (grpc:, grpc+tcp:)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
gRPC domain socket transport (grpc+unix:)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
gRPC + TLS transport (grpc+tls:)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
UCX transport (ucx:)	✓

Supported features in the gRPC transport:

Flight RPC Feature	C++	Java	Go	C#	Rust
All RPC methods	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Authentication handlers	✓	✓	✓	✓ (1)	✓
Call timeouts	✓	✓	✓		✓
Call cancellation	✓	✓	✓		✓
Concurrent client calls (2)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Custom middleware	✓	✓	✓		✓
RPC error codes	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Supported features in the UCX transport:

Flight RPC Feature	C++	Java	Go	JS	C#	Rust	Julia	Swift
All RPC methods	✓ (3)
Authentication handlers
Call timeouts
Call cancellation
Concurrent client calls	✓ (4)
Custom middleware
RPC error codes	✓

Notes:

(1) Support using AspNetCore authentication handlers.
(2) Whether a single client can support multiple concurrent calls.
(3) Only support for DoExchange, DoGet, DoPut, and GetFlightInfo.
(4) Each concurrent call is a separate connection to the server (unlike gRPC where concurrent calls are multiplexed over a single connection). This will generally provide better throughput but consumes more resources both on the server and the client.

See also

The Arrow Flight RPC specification.

Flight SQL#

Note

Flight SQL is still experimental.

The feature support refers to the client/server libraries only; databases which implement the Flight SQL protocol in turn will support/not support individual features.

Feature	C++	Java	Go	C#	Rust
BeginSavepoint	✓	✓
BeginTransaction	✓	✓
CancelQuery	✓	✓
ClosePreparedStatement	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
CreatePreparedStatement	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
CreatePreparedSubstraitPlan	✓	✓
EndSavepoint	✓	✓
EndTransaction	✓	✓
GetCatalogs	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetCrossReference	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetDbSchemas	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetExportedKeys	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetImportedKeys	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetPrimaryKeys	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetSqlInfo	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetTables	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetTableTypes	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
GetXdbcTypeInfo	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
PreparedStatementQuery	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
PreparedStatementUpdate	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
StatementSubstraitPlan	✓	✓
StatementQuery	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
StatementUpdate	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

See also

The Arrow Flight SQL specification.

C Data Interface#

Feature	C++	Python	R	Rust	Go	Java	C/GLib	Ruby	C#	nanoarrow
Schema export	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Array export	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Schema import	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Array import	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

See also

The C Data Interface specification.

C Stream Interface#

Feature	C++	Python	R	Rust	Go	Java	C/GLib	Ruby	Julia	C#	Swift	nanoarrow
Stream export	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓		✓		✓
Stream import	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓		✓		✓

See also

The C Stream Interface specification.

Third-Party Data Formats#

Format	C++	Java	Go	Rust	Julia
Avro		R	R
CSV	R/W	R (2)	R/W	R/W	R/W
ORC	R/W	R (1)
Parquet	R/W	R (2)	R/W	R/W

Notes:

R = Read supported
W = Write supported
(1) Through JNI bindings. (Provided by org.apache.arrow.orc:arrow-orc)
(2) Through JNI bindings to Arrow C++ Datasets. (Provided by org.apache.arrow:arrow-dataset)