Details
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New Feature
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Status: Reopened
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
Description
Dan and I spent the hackathon tinkering with the Apache Arrow format. Arrow is an in-memory columnar format designed to be the common data format for a large number of projects, see here. One place we thought adding this would be particularly fitting is when sending results back to the client, since this currently returns row-wise data. By returning Arrow, this could open the door to simpler and faster integration with other projects.
The server-side changes can be localized to the tablet service and wire protocol. We considered using Arrow more exhaustively throughout the server codebase, but found that because Arrow and Kudu's own in-memory format (i.e. that in kudu::ColumnBlock) are so similar, a simpler approach is to copy the buffers from ColumnBlock to the scan response and build arrow::Arrays client-side. A POC of the server-side changes can be found here: https://github.com/danburkert/kudu/tree/arrow
At the time of writing this, the arrow::Array type has a varying number of arrow::Buffers, depending on the data type (e.g. one for null bitmaps, one for data, etc). The ColumnBlock "buffers" (i.e. data, null_bitmap) should be compatible with these Buffers with a couple of modifications:
- The null-bitmaps in arrow are the complement of those used by Kudu
- The RowBlock that owns the ColumnBlocks has a selection vector needs to be accounted for
If the buffers are transferred over the wire (via sidecars or protobuf), they should be able to be converted to Arrays via arrow::ArrayData or directly via the Array constructors.
Attachments
Issue Links
- is related to
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- Closed
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IMPALA-9810 Support Kudu's columnar scan format (Apache Arrow)
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- Open
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- relates to
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- Open
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