If I recall, Arrow is more or less a standardized representation in memory of columnar data. It tends to not be used directly I believe, but as the foundation for higher level libraries (like Polars, etc.). That said, I'm not an expert here so might not have full info.

▲

tormeh 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You can absolutely use it directly, but it is painful. The USP of Arrow ist that you can pass bits of memory between Polars, Datafusion, DuckDB, etc. without copying. It's Parquet but for memory.

	▲	skeeter2020 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is true, and as a result IME the problem space is much smaller than Parquet, but it can be really powerful. The reality is most of us don't work in environments where Arrow is needed.