[ARROW-6823] [C++][Python][R] Support metadata in the feather format?

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.17.0
• Component/s: C++, Python, R
• Labels: feather
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/23155
• Assignee: Wes McKinney
• Reporter: Joris Van den Bossche
• Created: 09/Oct/19 06:56
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:49
• Resolved: 09/Apr/20 23:25

Description

This might need to wait / could be enabled by the feather v2 (ARROW-5510), but thought to open a specific issue about it: do we want to support saving metadata in feather files?

With Parquet files, you can have file-level metadata (which we currently use to eg store the pandas_metadata). I think it would be useful to have a similar mechanism for Feather files.

A use case where this came up is in GeoPandas where we would like to store the Coordinate Reference System identifier of the geometry data inside the file, to avoid needing a sidecar file just for that.

In a v2 world (using the IPC format), I suppose this could be the metadata of the Schema.