[ARROW-1993] [Python] Add function for determining implied Arrow schema from pandas.DataFrame

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.12.0
• Component/s: Python
• Labels: beginner pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/17976
• Assignee: Krisztian Szucs
• Reporter: Wes McKinney
• Created: 12/Jan/18 23:03
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:18
• Resolved: 26/Nov/18 14:29

Description

Currently the only option is to use Table/Array.from_pandas which does significant unnecessary work and allocates memory. If only the schema is of interest, then we could do less work and not allocate memory.

We should provide the user a function pyarrow.Schema.from_pandas which takes a DataFrame as an input and returns the respective Arrow schema. The functionality for determing the schema is already available in the Python code, it is at moment just very tightly bound to the conversion infrastructure.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #1929